Life is full of chance meetings and events, coupled with very conscious decisions. The proximity to Lake Superior, and Northland understanding that the variability of my high school grades showed engaged passion essential for my success, brought me to Northland College.

My stepmother suggested getting a job in Bayfield in the sailboat charter service, partly trading on a family friend owning a boat there, and my love of sailing.

Later as a Northland graduate looking for work in a laboratory, I called numbers out of the yellow pages and landed a job, making sodium hyaluronate, a component in the fluid in your eyeballs. The president said he approved me because of my sailing experience and included me on sailing trips with his financial advisor’s customers. I am still a part of that group today.

Today, every day, my company, Formacoat LLC., works with sodium hyaluronate as a medical device coating. And I sail with my two sons every chance we get. One of those sons, Brontë Goodspeed Gross ‘17, is now himself a Northland College graduate that turned his college major and our family passion, sailing, as his way of working through college—in Bayfield, Wisconsin, teaching sailing.

The circle has made a revolution.