Ever since he was ten years old, baseball was all Andrew Otovic wanted to do. Now he works around the sport every day as an administrator with the medical staff for the Dodgers. He calls the job a dream come true.
“I get to go to a place every day that I genuinely love,” he says. “LA is way bigger than I realized. LA is huge.”
After gradating from UMB, Otovic went to Southern New Hampshire University to get a master’s degree in Sports Management. He finished that in March 2013. 
“I was looking for jobs in the sports industry, but I had no luck, until I had a conversation with a childhood connection,” he says. “She passed over some job applications, and they were all from the Dodgers. It was kind of pick the job you want. I picked the job I have now, and three weeks later I had the job.” 
Out of high school, heading to college, Otovic wanted to stay near his family in Massachusetts, so UMass Boston was the obvious choice. He could keep the jobs he had at that time.
“I also really like the idea of being able to have the dorm kind of life, but not having a dorm type of restrictions, like rules and RAs, and whatnot, so that part was very appealing. I liked the fact that UMass was a school that was on the rise, and looking back now as compared to where it was when I graduated, it’s like night and day, with the new buildings.”
He met the Sports Editor from the Mass Media in a class, and started writing about the UMass sports teams.
“Being able to write for Sports allows you to put what you think and say during games into a story that 10 or 50 or 100 or 1000 people would read. To be able to do that for the school was an honor. It was something I really enjoyed. It was nice to be on that side of it, and have a chance to learn about all these hidden secrets that the rest of the campus doesn’t know about, and get a chance to share them with the campus.”
Otovic soon became the Sports Editor, and spent most of his time outside of classes in the student newspaper offices. 
“Being able to spend significant time, even if it was broken up for two hours here, an hour there, that was a great thing about work at the newspaper. It wasn’t just a job. It was a group. It was a bunch of friends who enjoyed each other’s time and company. We were having too much fun upstairs in the office.” 
The communities that form outside of classes through student activities particularly impressed Otovic.
“UMass did a great job of bringing people of all different backgrounds together, and took kids with different personalities, and situations and brought them all out as successful adults. It may not be a division one school academics wise or athletics wise, but it certainly brings out division one people. It starts with teachers, and it goes all the way down to students. You can’t ask for much more than that.” 
Because UMass is not a huge school, because of the intimacy of the campus and the classroom, Otovic was able to develop strong relationships with his teachers. 
“A lot of people I know went to school in places where they were happy if their teacher even knew their name, because of the class size. To take classes that were so personal, I don’t think many schools besides UMass could offer that.” 
Calculus 1 and 2 were Otovic’s favorite classes. He says he had a funky teacher who brought life to formulas and equations. 
“UMass was a school where the teachers treated you like adults. They had high expectations for you, but they also understood too you had a life or a job, or jobs, or sometimes kids,” he says. 
“It was amazing how everyone got along because there were so many different backgrounds, and heritages, religions, races, whatever. The students had a little chip on their shoulders.”
“UMass opened to a lot of students who were first time college students in their family, or had a tough situation at home, or had a tough situation of their own, whether it be a single parent or whatever the case was. I felt that the students were gritty, hard nosed kids that were determined to live as successful adults.” 
In the second semester of his freshman year, Otovic remembers one of his English professors asking the class to write something, anything, and to bring it back to talk about in the next class.
“From that moment on, after my freshman year, I realized you go to college not only to get an education, but you go to college to become creative, to learn to do things multiple ways, and not always do it the way that the textbook says, or the way that the book says. The teachers allowed us to be creative, and they took examples from everything in life.”
Otovic drove past UMass when he was visiting his folks last Christmas. 
“I thought that school was destined for great things when I graduated, but now that first building there next to where the Science building was, it’s out of this world. That school is going to take over that whole area. We all knew it was just a matter of time.”
“Driving by it, I’ve only been gone, not even two years, and that school looks 100 percent different than it looked when I left, and as an alumnus that’s pretty exciting.”