K People and Experiences Inspire Young Alumni Couple's Planned Gift

Ghafari and McCarthy, vacationing in Portugal, have included the College as a beneficiary of a retirement plan.

Casey Ghafari is less than six months old, yet he’s already being recruited as a Kalamazoo College student-athlete.

His parents, Caitlin McCarthy ’13 and Mark Ghafari ’14, delighted in the recruitment letter sent by one of the K football coaches, who is married to a cousin of McCarthy’s. Relationships, connection and athletics—this simple story touches on some of the most important themes in McCarthy’s and Ghafari’s K stories.

Ghafari came to K from the Detroit area for the small school and ability to play basketball. He also played various intramural sports and worked for the athletic department.

“The athletic department is such a tight-knit group,” Ghafari said. “It wasn’t just my basketball coaches; it was other coaches across the department rooting for me and helping push me. Really, all the athletic staff was incredible in terms of mentorship.”

An economics major, he found a similar dynamic in the economics and business department; when he starts listing mentors (Hannah Apps, Chuck Stull, Tim Moffit, Ahmed Hussen, Patrik Hultberg), McCarthy chimes in, “You’re just listing the entire department!”

At K, Ghafari studied abroad in Strasbourg, France, completed internships at Eaton Corporation and Raymond James investment banking company, worked for the Center for Career and Professional Development and tackled a Senior Integrated Project on the economic impact on different cities of hosting the summer Olympics. He appreciated the academic calendar and small classes.

“I loved the fast-paced nature of the term system,” Ghafari said. “I think it was awesome to just have three classes that you could dig deep into in a short period of time, and that worked for the way I learned. I also loved the small class sizes. I knew most of my professors by first name, which was important for me.”

McCarthy, on the other hand, was initially reluctant about K’s size—and its proximity to her hometown of Grand Rapids. Heavily recruited to play soccer, however, she agreed to an overnight visit at K during the spring of her senior year of high school and found that spending time on the campus and with the soccer team “just felt right.” At the last minute, she changed her plan from University of Michigan to Kalamazoo College, “and it could not have been a better fit for me,” she said.

The relationships she formed with coaching staff and teammates represent a key part of her K experiences.

“Both of us have incredible friend groups from college that we're close with to this day,” McCarthy said. “They're mostly our teammates, because we spent so much time with them, and they are some of our best friends. I can't emphasize enough how the community that we built at K is still very much a present and important part of our lives.”

McCarthy completed a double major in chemistry and psychology with a health studies concentration. She worked in a research lab at the University of Michigan for her SIP, which looked at using hydrogen sulfide in treating heart attacks in rabbits.

“Even though it was not a topic that I was particularly passionate about, I made some good connections and learned lab skills that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise,” she said. “I love the SIP as a concept, because I think pushing young college kids to come up with a project that detailed and then to execute it and spend that much time on it is a great experience.”

She also worked as a teaching assistant in statistics for Eric Nordmoe and in psychology for Karyn Boatwright.

After graduating from K in 2013, McCarthy taught high school chemistry in Detroit through Teach for America while making plans for medical school. Diane Kiino, who was director of the health sciences program and graduate fellowships advisor at the time, proved a crucial resource.

“I was really stressed out trying to decide if I should hurry up and take the MCAT very quickly during my first year of teaching, and she gave me invaluable advice, which was: In the grand scheme of things, a year is not a very long time. That encouraged me to slow down the process. I took a third year of teaching and did things at my own pace instead of trying to rush, and that was valuable advice that I have taken with me.”

When he graduated in 2014, Ghafari initially accepted a job offer from Eaton Corporation, where he had completed an internship, before declining the offer to continue his basketball career with a team based in Lebanon, where both his parents were from. When he returned to the U.S., Ghafari started working at Merrill Lynch. He completed an M.B.A. at the University of Michigan, and then in 2020, he and his business partner merged their financial services practice with an independent firm.

“It's a much more entrepreneurial environment,” Ghafari said. “The firm is called Innovia Wealth now. I consider myself very entrepreneurial, and one of the things I love about K is that K never teaches you what to think; they teach you how to think. Especially as a student-athlete, you learn critical thinking skills, you learn time management, you learn how to work in a team environment, and all of those skills are really applicable in what I do on a day-to-day basis.”

Ghafari and McCarthy agree that K teaches critical thinking and communication skills.

“Being in small classes with structured conversations was such a valuable thing, at such a young age, that kids who are in a 300-person lecture hall are just not getting,” McCarthy said. “You're forced to get out of your comfort zone. Often, I will interact with people and think, ‘How do these people not know how to communicate effectively?’ I think that it's built into K because it's so small and because of the way that the academics are prioritized. We all learned effective communication, whether we wanted to or not.”

Also in 2020, McCarthy graduated from Michigan State College of Human Medicine, and she and Ghafari moved to Milwaukee, where McCarthy is now nearing the end of her psychiatry residency at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

“When I was in medical school, I thought for sure I was going to do a surgical specialty, because I identified as a competitive jock and I thought I would love the high-stress nature of surgery,” McCarthy said. “I actually had a bit of a career crisis when I really loved my psychiatry rotation, because I hadn't thought I would end up in psychiatry. But I loved it, and it was the specialty that I looked forward to the most. Looking back, I should never have been surprised by that, because I was a chemistry and psychology double major, which essentially is psychiatry, and I spent all that time working with Karyn (Boatwright) in counseling psych. I was primed from my time at K to end up where I am, and it is absolutely the best fit for me. I love my job and feel grateful and privileged to do the work that I do.”

McCarthy and Ghafari hope to move back to Michigan in the next few years and to continue to travel. They have attended homecoming when they are able, and have stayed involved with their respective teams. In addition to recruiting student-athletes, Ghafari has also served on search committees for a basketball coach and for athletic director, as well as on the Board of Trustees as a young alumni trustee.

“Serving on the board opened my eyes to the financial workings of the College,” Ghafari said. “It got me thinking that if I can do something to help out with these campaigns and the future of the College, then I should. I was very fortunate that my parents were in a position financially to be able to help me and my siblings go to college (Carl ’15, Carina ’19). If Caitlin and I can help the next generation of students have that opportunity, we want to do that.”

Ghafari and McCarthy are particularly passionate about supporting athletics at K.

“A Division III liberal arts school doesn't have a ton of resources to support athletics, and we’re passionate about what athletics can provide for students and for a campus,” Ghafari said. “It was really important to me to be both a student and an athlete, and K was a place that allowed me to excel at both. Continuing the ability for students to have a great education in tandem with a great athletic experience is something that we are both really passionate about in supporting the school.”

As a young family, early career, they felt their ability to give back financially was limited, and so Ghafari updated his 401(k) plan to include the College as a beneficiary. Doing so made them the youngest members of the Stetson Society, recognizing those who have made planned gift arrangements to support the College.

“Kalamazoo College has been so impactful for both of us and the relationships we’ve been able to build,” Ghafari said. “We want the place to stay around for the next 150 years, and we are glad to play a small part in that.

“We’re very fortunate that we’re both going to have strong careers from a financial perspective. Working in the financial services industry, I’ve seen firsthand how other people give back to organizations and matters they’re passionate about. This was a way for us to arrange that early on in life and make sure that we continue to be intentional going forward.”