A few minutes with Foy

Senior Todd Foy takes a subtle glance over my shoulder at a clock, too quickly to be noticed normally. He clearly has bigger things on his mind, but I have 45 minutes with him until he has to resume his duties as Student Government Association, SGA, president, a position he’s held since the fall.

I met Foy our freshman year. I can’t remember where, he has one of those personalities that makes him ubiquitous. I’ve yet to encounter a person at MCLA who doesn’t know his name.

“I just like to be social. I like talking to people and learning from people. The person I am was made by the people around me,” Foy said.

At first glance, Foy and I aren’t dressed dissimilarly, fairly casually by most standards. We’re both in jeans, shortsleve shirts, and Converse low-tops, but he’s dressed very well in a way that I can’t seem to put my finger on. After a minute or two it hits me, his pants and polo shirt fit closely to his thin physique, and both are shades of blue that play off of his cerulean eyes.

His medium-length blond hair shifts only slightly with the sudden movements of his body. He talks with his hands. Each point he makes is punctuated with a flick of the wrist, a tilt of the head, or a shrug. On occasion his whole torso folds over almost to his knees, when something is raucously funny.

The 21-year-old from Hadley has taken a rare break this year from his normally jam-packed class schedule. He’s spending his remaining time at MCLA focusing on his presidency and finishing his minors in anthropology and social justice.

“I knew SGA would be insane. I know Jaynelle [Bellmore] is taking seven classes, I don’t know how she does it,” he said with a laugh and a nod to Bellmore, who is working behind us at a desk in the SGA office.
Though he’s worked with Colleges Against Cancer and the Class Council in the past, his junior year the political science major consolidated his activities to exclusively SGA.

“This is where my passions have always been, since freshman year,” Foy said. “Middle of junior year, I had just moved up to the executive board. You see a lot more on the [eboard].”

Foy said that there were a lot of issues that he began to notice at SGA and the College in general. This made him redouble his efforts in SGA and throw himself in headfirst.

Foy’s day is a mixed bag of classes and SGA appointments that stretch from nine in the morning till he finally stops between five and nine at night. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are for SGA and Tuesdays and Thursdays are for classes and homework.

I asked Foy: with such a busy schedule, how does he manage to stay physically active? He laughed.

“Assassin’s Creed is my exercise…I go home and I just sit…I’m just so exhausted that I just want to sit and pretend I’m a medieval assassin,” he said.

Saturday nights are for him and his “brothers,” though. The guys that Todd lives with are his closest friends and while he enjoys heading to the bar, the satisfaction of opening a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and booting up Super Smash Bros. with his housemates in their 21+ townhouse can’t be beat.

“I’ve found by now that you’ve hit that group of people that really know you well,” Foy said.

When Foy has a bad day he tends to retreat and get some perspective on his life, often by reading a book.

“I think a little bit, fume a little bit and jump into some other place,” he said. “I think some people don’t take time for themselves.”

Foy, who interned for Senator John Kerry last summer, recently applied for two jobs at political consulting firms in Boston and for a position with the Human Rights Campaign in Washington D.C.

Foy thanked a multitude of people from MCLA for helping him become the person he is today and getting where he is, including Jaynelle Bellmore, Jameek Clovie and Diane Collins. But the one person who came to mind was director of student development Celia Norcross.

“She’s like the mother of the campus,” Foy said. “She’s talked me off a lot of big cliffs I could have jumped off of.” But, he added, she allowed him to make enough mistakes so he would learn and grow.

“Celia’s the person I think of, but it’s been the whole community,” Foy said.

He finished by saying that he came to MCLA alone, and put himself through school. But he won’t be leaving the school alone, the changes; both the good and bad (mostly good he added) will stay with him.

Print PDF