Zach Parolin

Long before there was J.K. Rowling’s "Pottermore", there was Zach Parolin and a Harry Potter-inspired blog full of his favorite spells and some horribly inaccurate predictions. A self-proclaimed “Gryffindor”, Zach spent much of eighth grade blogging about his love of wizardry to his biggest fans: his mom, dad and older brother. Years later, this passion for web development has led Zach to a position as team Maven’s Interactive Specialist.

The Harry Potter blog has since vanished from the Web, but Zach’s blogging never ceased. Now he prefers to write and record acoustic-based music on his website, zachparolin.com. Despite his obvious affinity for music, Zach has no intentions of pursuing a performance career; he’ll leave that to the professionals. With that insight in mind, Zach has spent the past three summers in Nashville, Tenn., discovering his talent as a broadcaster while working for a weekly TV show on the Great American Country network. Zach’s favorite experience on the job occurred when he once “made passionate eye contact with Taylor Swift.” Needless to say, Zach is still waiting for her to write a song about it.

Back on campus, Zach is a passionate but modest “leader” within the prestigious Alumni Association Student Board (he’s actually former the President) and for Project Sol, an organization that seeks to provide children and teenagers with emergency shelter and a transitional living program. (He founded that one.) On the side, he coaches a Special Olympics basketball team, where his athletes affectionately refer to him as “LeBron James”, due to both his uncanny resemblance to the superstar and to that one time he actually made a basket. While in a lot of ways Zach is extremely successful, he’s still trying to live down his prediction that “Harry would eventually fall victim to Dumbledore, who was secretly an evil sidekick to Lord Voldemort.”