Earl D’Souza, an Honor’s Senior, is graduating this month with a major in Business Administration with a concentration in Global Business, and a double minor in Philosophy and Peace & Justice. D’Souza has recently accepted an offer of admission to the PhD program in Management (Strategic Management track) at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. After his academic career, he intends to become a tenure-track member of the faculty at a large research university.
While at St. Norbert College, D’Souza has had his fair share of experience with independent research projects funded through the Collaborative for Undergraduate Research program. Starting the summer after his sophomore year, he focused on examining NFL athlete Maxx Crosby’s narrative of his journey with regard to addiction to alcohol, and his outspoken advocacy for awareness about alcohol addiction, working under the mentorship of Dr. Laura Krull, Assistant Professor of Sociology. Within his first research project, he analyzed public interviews involving Crosby and applied qualitative analysis using an inductive approach, finding that Crosby built a unified narrative across all interviews. However, D’Souza found that Crosby “had an interesting difference from other athletes who’d written about their journey with alcoholism in that he did not have a ‘fall from grace’ due to his addiction, … and that the reason he was so outspoken about it was to raise awareness and show people that even successful athletes can suffer from alcoholism.” D’Souza wrote a paper about these findings and presented it at the Midwest Sociological Society’s annual conference in Chicago in March 2025.
His second research project “was an exploratory study seeking to understand how a change in policy at SNC, in September 2024, when the college announced that they would no longer use options for genders other than male and female in official materials and forms, affected the senses of belonging of queer students at SNC, and how (if at all) it affected campus climate as a whole.” D’Souza found that all but one of the queer students interviewed felt that the change made them feel as though they were less welcome at St. Norbert College. This project was presented at the Wisconsin Sociological Association’s annual conference in October 2025 at UW-Stout.
His final research project focused on the experiences of LGBTQ-identifying teachers at K-12 Catholic schools within the United States, where he conducted interviews and applied an inductive approach to the analysis. D’Souza notes that the “most interesting finding here was that all three subjects stated that their administrators were extremely accepting of their sexual orientation in private, but that there was a limitation on the degree to which they could show that acceptance in public due to the Catholic affiliation of the school, and a focus on the Catholic Church’s doctrine.” These findings were presented by D’Souza at the Midwest Sociological Society’s conference in St. Louis in March of 2026.
D’Souza attributes the Honors Program with encouraging him to explore new challenges and experiences and to develop himself in many ways that he otherwise may not have done without his involvement in the program. Additionally, he notes: “I don’t think I would’ve wound up taking the leap to get into research by cold emailing Dr. Krull the summer after sophomore year had I not been part of the Honors Program here.” When asked if he has any advice for current and incoming honors students, he emphasized that it is important to take the time to explore, get out of your comfort zone, and the most important advice he had to give was that it is essential to make mistakes. “You’re no one without your mistakes, and it’s not worth letting one stop you or slow you down. Just learn from them, and bounce back better. You may just find that it leaves you better off than people who’ve never learned how to fail.”
