About Us
The Carroll School of Management’s Joseph E. Corcoran Center for Real Estate and Urban Action continues its innovative mission with a new director, a firm resolve and even more opportunities.
The Joseph E. Corcoran Center for Real Estate and Urban Action, opened by the Carroll School of Management in November 2014, is a center for students seeking and pursuing interests in the field of real estate to become well-prepared, skilled and socially aware as they enter real estate related professions.
During a September interview with the Corcoran Center’s newly appointed director, Neil McCullagh, where he outlined the center’s goals and accomplishments, the importance and truly transformative power of the discipline of real estate was a pervasive theme.
Joseph E. Corcoran, a real estate development professional in Boston during the 1970s, grew up experiencing the hardships of low-income communities that had little intervention by the government and private developers to make those communities safer and more prosperous. His real estate development company, Corcoran Jennison, would later be responsible for turning Dorchester’s crime-ridden and odious Columbia Point housing project into the safe, beautifully maintained and desirable mixed-income housing community we know today as Harbor Point, showing Boston, and the world, what can be accomplished through commitment to community-conscious real estate development.
The new Center will move forward from this desire to reverse the course of struggling communities through professional development in order to create a world of budding opportunity for all.
In approaching these goals, the Center has set out a confined yet effective list of priorities: a curriculum through CSOM that ingrains the fundamentals of real estate development and familiarizes students with the industry (including courses that provide financial, historical and field work opportunities); the provision of experiential learning programs that place participants in real-world, practical engagements with the problems and opportunities faced by real estate professionals today (workshop skill trainings, field projects with agencies and internships); and the creation of future opportunities through access to a network of professionals focused on integrating a new generation of developers into the community-conscious field of real estate development (speaker series, networking events and Center-sponsored activities.)
This past summer a group of students interned with a range of real estate professionals through the services provided by the Center; some of their experiences consisted of researching industrial communities and developing strategies to support their job retention and expansion, managing a portfolio of numerous properties while recommending specific plans for their future conservation and developing websites to spread awareness and promote the possibility of a government grant to a positive community-changing development project.
The Corcoran Center, through its well thought-out curriculum and real-world engagement opportunities, will only grow its positive recognition with Neil McCullagh as its head.
His passions range from writing, to playing guitar and skiing. Lately, he has rediscovered the flows and beats of Hip Hop, and has been blasting some Dr. Dre and Kendrick; but at heart, one of his all-time favorite bands will always be Nirvana.
