Biography | Bernadette Meehan — The Chestnut Hill Hall Where She Took a Political Science Degree

People treat Boston College as a football Saturday and a stone tower on a hill.

For Bernadette Meehan the tower was the campus that produced a political science bachelor and, later, a Foreign Service officer.

Boston College Magazine identified her as Meehan '97 when it sent a group of undergraduates to meet her in Washington in January 2013.

She had left Chestnut Hill with a B.A. in political science and gone to Wall Street.

In December of her senior year she signed on as a financial analyst at J.P. Morgan.

She later worked as a vice president of private banking there, then as a vice president of asset management at Lehman Brothers.

The same magazine visit recorded the turn: in the winter of 2003 she read a Boston College Magazine cover profile of R. Nicholas Burns, then the U.S. ambassador to NATO, and began looking at the Foreign Service.

She joined the Department of State in March 2004.

Gasson Hall, the Collegiate Gothic tower Charles Donagh Maginnis completed in 1913, is the image most visitors take away from this campus.

The degree itself was earned across the Chestnut Hill buildings around it, not in a single seminar room that can be named from the public record.

The pin is the hall that stands for the college she actually attended.

Photo: Gasson Hall by Faolin42, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: U.S. Department of State, public domain.