Alum Keeps a Steady Course

Sean Hannigan ’18 knows what it’s like to be up against something he can’t control. Whether he’s navigating a sailboat, a public health issue or a life without three of his gastrointestinal organs, the former crew member of the College’s champion offshore sailing team has learned that – if you really want to stay on course – you have to accept the situation, adjust your expectations and adapt your plans. And then you just keep on going.

It’s an awful thing to see suffering and know there’s nothing you can do to make it stop. The first time Sean Hannigan ’18 encountered that unbearable helplessness, he knew he couldn’t feel that way again. From then on, he’d find a way to help – he’d do everything in his power. He’d do whatever it takes.

He was just 6 years old – too little to help the man in the street. He didn’t have the skills to do whatever he needed to do. He didn’t even know what needed to be done. All he knew was the man was hit by a car, and now he was in pain.

“It’s OK, Sean – he’s getting the care he needs,” his mom told him at the Chinese restaurant, where she was trying to calm him down over a cup of tea. She’d stopped the car at the scene, made sure help was on the way, but she couldn’t console her precious, kind-hearted little boy. “It isn’t up to you to fix this – no one expected you to do anything.”

But Sean expected it of himself. It was the right thing to do. You help people in need – you just do. That much Sean knew from the very beginning. And to help as many people as he could, he knew something else: He had a lot to learn.

Sean may have been the youngest of the family, but he always had an old soul. Despite the doting adoration from his two older sisters and loving parents, Sean was the nurturer and the warrior – always concerned for others, always standing up for the downtrodden. It didn’t matter if he was one of the smallest kids in his class, he didn’t think twice about confronting the bullies in his school for picking on his classmates.

“He’s just always been that way,” says his mom, Sherry Hannigan. “He just has loving-kindness in him, and he shares it with everyone. And he does it like he does everything: at 100 miles an hour. There’s no in between.”

Between his kind heart and his innate moral compass, doing the right thing and helping others came easy to Sean. A little more difficult for the eager altruist: finding the patience to grow up so he could be big enough and strong enough to help strangers on the street. Dressing up as a police officer for Halloween just wasn’t cutting it – he wanted to be a cop now.

“His nemesis has always been himself in that his expectations for himself are always far above not what he can actually achieve, but what he can achieve right then,” his mother says. “He’s the kid who goes into class on the first day and gets upset with himself because he doesn’t already know the stuff.”

All he could do was keep on learning. As Sean’s impatience spilled over into his appetite for knowledge, it eventually led to an obsession with all things science. He spent days upon days sitting in the library, soaking up everything he could about animals and the biological world. “Then it just transitioned from being strictly biology to the natural earth sciences, and then chemistry and mathematics,” he says. “It’s just the way my brain likes to work.”

The truth is, Sean’s brain just likes to work. He’s got this unquenchable thirst for learning that only gets thirstier the more he learns. As a kid, it’s what compelled him to read the entire set of encyclopedias, cover to cover. As an adult, it’s what drives him to take a deeper look at every … little … thing.

Nothing is safe from Sean’s curiosity. Not even beer.

“I brew my own beer, so I get to cultivate my own yeasts and play around with the esters and ketones and everything else – all the little components – to try to perfect my favorite strain of yeast,” he says. “Just tweaking every bit about it: So, ‘OK, if I change it by three degrees, does that change the amount of sweetness to something more complex or something more simple?’”

His questions are always followed by another question – not because the answers aren’t satisfying, but because the questions are.

“With every question, he makes these connections that make him dig even deeper,” says John Creed, associate professor of political science at the College, where Sean would come to study public health. “There’s always more to figure out and more to ask about. He has a capacity for continual curiosity – he just keeps seeking out more information. And he has the ability to apply what he learns and make connections in other areas of his own life.”

You can’t confine Sean’s learning. Not to one question, not to one answer, not to one topic. His is the kind of learning that doesn’t fit neatly into the pages of a book – it can’t be bound between the A and the XYZ volumes of the encyclopedia. It doesn’t adhere to those kinds of constraints.

Raising the Sails

At first, Sean hated going out on the water. He’d rather go below and sit in the cabin than be out there skimming across that slippery space where the water meets the sky.

“Being on a boat didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me – I just didn’t have any interest,” says Sean, who was born in California and spent his childhood in Tucson, Ariz., before his family moved to Annapolis, Md. “I always joke that I’m just a desert rat at heart.”

But that rat eventually found its sea legs. And, as the story goes, we have John Maliszeski, Yuengling and maybe Jimmy Buffet to thank for that. Maliszeski, the Hannigans’ neighbor in Annapolis, was a middle-aged, rugged Polish guy with a big, heavy keelboat and – as far as Sean could tell – only one song on his playlist.

“It was always ‘Margaritaville,’” says Sean with a laugh. “Literally, that’s it.”

Maliszeski had invited the then 14-year-old Sean to come out and join his crew for a Wednesday night race, and – after they’d raced the super-slow boat around some cans on the Magothy River for a couple of hours – Maliszeski cranked up the radio, ripped open a bag of Utz pretzels and offered Sean an ice-cold Yuengling: “Do you think your parents would mind?”

“I was like, ‘Of course not! I’m a responsible 14-year-old!’” laughs Sean. “It kept me coming back! I was like, ‘All right! See y’all next week!’”

After a while, Sean didn’t need the extra incentive. And, before he knew it, he was no longer just watching from the back of the boat.

“Suddenly, now I’m trimming, now I’m doing this and that, and other people were asking for crew, and I jumped boats,” he says. “It was just kind of like the fuse had been lit at that point.”

And not just for Sean – now that the word was out that he was a lightweight crewmember with some skills, he was in high demand.

“I would get all these calls from these grown men asking if Sean could come out – it was a battle for who could get him first,” laughs Sherry. “These 50- and 60-year-old men were his peers – any other kid would have been bored to tears, but Sean was born this old soul. His destiny was set at this point.”

Sean learned everything about sailing that he could, even taking a job as a dock assistant at the Annapolis Harbor Master, but it’s the lessons about patience, adaptability and fortitude that have mattered the most.

“Sailing informs everything I do,” he says. “It really ties into everything in my life – and I inevitably end up meshing sailing with the different things going on in my life. Every time I’d go out, sailing would give me another life lesson – or at least present a challenge that I could then kind of lay my own problems onto. You’re dealing with forces that are totally out of your control, with forces that are invisible. You’re using these principles to try to make it work for you, so it makes it very easy to turn it into a metaphorical lesson.”

He knew firsthand that life wasn’t always smooth sailing – that there are storms we have to weather, and sometimes we’re thrown off course. They may have been metaphorical out on the water, but back on land, these life lessons were getting all too real.

Uncharted Waters

It was the stuff of every parent’s nightmare – not to be able to take all the pain and fear away, not to be able to promise that everything will be OK in the morning.

Sean was 15 years old when his immune system started attacking the cells in his large intestine. As a sophomore at Broadneck High School, he was diagnosed was ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammatory disease that causes ulcers on the inner lining of the large intestine, but it was the subsequent complications from his treatments that were the hardest on his young body.

Adult-sized doses of steroids caused his veins to burst and the tips of his knee bones to die, resulting in a double knee replacement. The barrage of drugs and biologics had his immune system so worn down that with every surgery came a new complication. In pre-op for one surgery, he had no blood pressure for a solid two minutes. And a 13-hour surgery to remove his large intestine and rebuild it from a section of his small intestine resulted in sepsis and constant infections for a solid four years.

“Anything and everything that could go wrong went wrong. So, we just would make trips back and forth, back and forth,” says his mom, who – together with his dad – spent a good part of two years trading off 24-hour shifts with Sean at Georgetown University’s pediatrics ward. “We would sit and just cry. And to have to tell someone, ‘I don’t know why this is happening to you’: That is horrible. Especially at that age.

“I guess I could have fallen apart and been useless,” she adds, “but that’s not my nature. My nature is that of, ‘We’re going to do something. You embrace the suck. You find a way to get through. Whatever it takes.’”

And so the Hannigans learned to live with it. To adapt. To adjust.

“It was either give up or put up the best fight I could,” says Sean, who – when it was all said and done – had eight gastrointestinal surgeries, ultimately removing his gall bladder, appendix and his entire large intestine, leaving him with a colostomy bag. “Even though it comes with its hang-ups and limitations, I’ve found a way to make it work.

“My dad used to say, ‘Be fluid. Be like water. Change to your environment.’ And part of that is letting go of old expectations and accepting the new normal,” he adds. “So, I made the conscious decision to find a new normal. If you keep tweaking what is the baseline of the new normal, then before long, it’s just your life.”

Sean’s life wasn’t going back to Broadneck High. It wasn’t going to give him all the experiences that his classmates were having – those milestones that, one way or another, shape you into who you become. Life for Sean wasn’t ever going to be defined by high school trauma or drama that he’d one day either try to run from or return to.

“It’s amazing how many lessons you learn in high school: how to date people, how to socially engage with people in meaningful ways, the whole popularity thing – so many different things that you really learn in that environment that aren’t academic,” says Sean. “And I lost out on all that.”

He finished high school from home, though his homeschool teacher’s lessons were nothing compared to what he was learning from being sick.

“I was learning deeper, meaningful life lessons,” he says. “Things that normally take a life of experience to learn, I got in this short burst. People say I’m an old soul, but I had to go from 15 to 50 all at once – I was slung-shot into these lessons that most people my age don’t yet have.”

On Course

Childhood dreams face a lot of competition over the years – especially when you’re spending those formative years fighting for your life. But that didn’t throw Sean off. He was still going to find a way to help people – now he just had a new plan for how to do it.

“I got to see the medical profession from a unique perspective, and it really had an impact on me. I’d seen the system and its inefficiencies – and maybe I could make the system better, improve it for other people,” says Sean, noting that his father’s job in law enforcement with the FDA made him think beyond traditional medicine. “I realized that it would be really difficult to make a real, systemic difference if I did pre-med: I would be a drop of water in an ocean. But with public health, I can make a bigger impact on population morbidity and mortality by creating policy, creating public health interventions and adjusting environmental and behavioral factors, so I really started running off in that direction.”

It led him right to the College of Charleston. Not only did it have a vaunted public health program, but it had the perfect environment for the intimate kind of learning Sean craved. It also had a sailing team that was the best in the country and a robust outreach program for promoting the sport in the greater Charleston community.

He couldn’t have landed in a better place.

Sean hit the ground running. He started sailing with the College’s varsity offshore team and was brought on to work as a dock assistant at the College’s J. Stewart Walker Sailing Complex and as a teaching assistant for both adult and youth sailing classes in the College’s Learn to Sail program.

“What stood out about Sean was that he was exceptionally enthusiastic and hardworking,” says Greg Fisher, the director of the sailing program. “He really made it his job to be a student of the sport.”

But, then, he’s a student of almost everything.

“He’s not just learning things to learn things. Learning matters to him and to his life. He didn’t come to college to graduate; he’s here to learn and find more things to learn about – and that’s what this experience should do for every student,” says Professor Creed, who recognized something special in Sean from the get-go and made it a point to help him become a more efficient learner. “He is the perfect example of what the College can do for a student and also what a student can do for the College.”

“He’s not there just to talk the talk,” agrees Brian Bossak, associate professor of public health, who led Sean in a water quality testing project that really demonstrated Sean’s leadership and his commitment to doing everything possible to learn more. “He wants to get out there in the field and get his hands dirty. The research team was so much stronger because of him.”

And so was the sailing team.

“In offshore sailing, the crew relies on communication and teamwork because it has to operate as a single unit – and this is where Sean really excelled,” says Fisher. “He built that relationship with his teammates.”

And, as a testament to that relationship, last year his teammates elected him captain of the team, which won the national offshore championship in 2014.

“They all respected his passion and his skills in leadership,” says Fisher. “That really makes a difference. Because of that, he was able to take us all to a new level.”

Aside from giving him the most competitive, high-performance sailing of his life, the team also gave him the strength he needed to get through the tough times he was still facing physically, which included three more surgeries after arriving at the College.

“The team really became my support network, my family,” says Sean. “It made me realize just the size and scope of the family and true brotherhood that I have with so many different people. If it were not for the sailing team, I would not have gotten through the illness as successfully as I’ve been able to. There’s no way to overstate the way it impacted me to have that community and brotherhood.”

Even with the support of the team, things weren’t easy for Sean. There were times when he really shouldn’t have been going to class, much less going to sail. There were times when he ended up in the hospital because he kept pushing himself. And there were two times when he was forced to give into the illness and take the entire semester off because he was just too sick.

“I tripped up a few times trying to cope with the stress because I kept holding onto these really high expectations of myself that were simply not achievable – I forgot to let go of the past and accept the new normal,” says Sean, admitting that he began abusing the opiates he’d been prescribed. “I isolated myself pretty severely during those times.”

It was the sailing team and his love for the sport that pulled him out of that funk enough to enroll back in school.

“Throughout that entire journey, I continued to stay on the water,” says Sean, who also stayed on the winning course with his teammates time and time again – most recently winning the J22 class in Charleston Race Week in April. “I pushed through, and I kept pushing, and was able to ultimately look back on my sailing career thus far and be really proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish.”

Another pride point: Sean’s expanded role as the community outreach director in the sailing program, which allows him to share the sailing experience with people who might not otherwise get the opportunity.

“My goal there is to increase accessibility to sailing and increase the diversity of the sailing community – because, let’s face it, the sailing community is disproportionately wealthy white people. So, how can we change that?”

The steps the sailing program has taken are all so perfect for Sean: There are STEM camps that bring in kids from impoverished areas to teach them sailing and the math and engineering that goes into it. And then there’s the work he does through Warrior Sailing, Adaptive Expeditions and even Special Olympics – all of which share the sailing experience with people who have varying levels of disabilities or physical impairments.

“Sean has a real passion for this – for making the sport available and fun for people,” says Fisher, adding that – whether it’s a sailing fundamental, an advanced seamanship class or an adaptive program for people with sensory disabilities – Sean will go out of his way to make it the best it can be. “I think that’s the coolest thing about him. If he sees that people will get more out of a program if it extends all weekend rather than just a few hours, he’ll make it happen. He’s going to do it the right way. It doesn’t matter that the right way is not the easy way.”

It’s no surprise, really. He hadn’t gotten this far in life the easy way. He’d fought for his life to get here, and now that he’d made it, he’d fight for other people who need help. He’d do everything he could.

Come About

There was nothing more he could do. It was no longer up to him.

When Sean first met Timothy, it’d been at Charleston’s Bridge Church, where Sean had started volunteering with the homeless community. They’d become friends, shared stories, meals and laughs. Sean had taken him to the library, helped him build a résumé, given him the resources he needed to land a job paying $12 an hour, a cell phone and a bed at a shelter. But Timothy had lost the bed and the job. And, after struggling to help him back on his feet for a few months, Sean had lost touch with the man.

“I try not to blame myself for having to step away and say, ‘I need to hand this over to you and let you be your own advocate now,’ but I do think about him every day,” says Sean, who first got involved in Charleston’s homeless population through volunteering with Lowcountry Community Outreach and then through running shelters for the American Red Cross during Hurricane Irma.

“Working the shelter was what did it: For 48 hours, I talked to these people, listening to their stories about their families, eating with them, playing card games. They taught me things: They taught me some really cool card games,” laughs Sean. “I was able to make a connection with them that was deep and meaningful. At that point, there was no turning back.”

Since then, he has not only continued his casework and volunteer outreach with Bridge Church and with the American Red Cross’ disaster action team, but also interned with the American Red Cross, where he serves as a youth engagement partner, leading Red Cross Clubs across the Lowcountry to help them prevent, prepare and respond to emergencies.

“One thing I’ve learned from this work is that I have to manage my expectations of what I can do,” says Sean. “As someone in public health, I like to grab hold of these really big problems that don’t have single solutions – and the solutions are not easy. So you have to manage your expectations and accept that you’re just laying the groundwork. So, in the case of homelessness, the way I can start to make a difference is to start to understand the different components, and that starts with just having a conversation.”

The conversations that have come from his work with the homeless have taught Sean some important lessons – not just about the risk factors, the symptoms, the prevention and the complexity of homelessness, but about himself and his own challenges.

He’s learned that he can’t always do it alone, that he needs to ask for help, that he needs to set boundaries in his own life and take care of himself before he can take care of others – something that his mom, Sherry, expressed to him through the symbolic gift of an oxygen mask. As any flight attendant will tell you, you have to take care of yourself before assisting others.

“He’s learning his limitations – that he can’t save the world all at once,” says Sherry, adding that Sean’s experience with Timothy was a huge teachable moment. “He thought he’d failed Timothy, and we had a lot of discussions about that. ‘You went above and beyond, and you got all these things done, but Timothy wasn’t ready for it,’ I told him.

“So, for both Timothy and Sean, the experience was a lesson in failing forward,” she continues. “Because every time you fail, you come out of the ashes and you are a new person. You take those experiences with you and you just keep growing in wisdom and strength. And don’t let the failure consume you and be stuck in that time with fear. But go ahead and move forward – and that’s the strength right there.”

And that strength continues as he continues to move forward. Sean graduated in May with more fire in his belly than ever before, with more confidence in his abilities than he’s ever had.

“The goal of education is to help students find their passion and let their passion find them,” says Creed. “Sean does both of those things – he has real enthusiasm and passion for very specific interests but is also always open to something new. More than any other student, I can be sure that he will never stop learning.”

As of now, Sean has his eyes on a master of public health in epidemiology, a bachelor of science in nursing and then joining the U.S. Public Health Service as a commissioned officer before he goes into epidemiological intelligence with the Centers for Disease Control.

“Basically, I want to be the boots on the ground doing the intelligence and reconnaissance work of disease,” he says. “Kind of like sailing, you’re working with an invisible force and trying to manage it. You’re doing the same thing with disease: You can’t see it, but you’re trying to make these changes that ultimately work in your favor, or, in this case, society’s favor.”

“I know that whatever he does once he leaves the College, it’ll help people who are less fortunate and make their lives better. And you can’t be any more special than that,” says Fisher, noting that his own life is better because of Sean’s influence. “He’s given me really important tools that show me the value in what I can offer – and he’s taught me that I can help people.”

And, as Sean is the first to tell you, learning that you do have the power to make a difference – no matter what you’re up against – well, that can take you as far as you want to go.