Boulter, assistant vice president for facilities services, has been fighting cancer for more than two years.
Mark Boulter arrived at Northeastern on a football scholarship in 1978. Five decades later, he’s still on campus — as assistant vice president for facilities services.
Boulter oversees day-to-day operations for Northeastern’s planning, real estate and facilities team. When snowstorms hit, he leads the around-the-clock cleanup. During the COVID-19 pandemic, his team helped keep the campus open.
He’s spent decades solving problems and keeping the university running — but nothing in his career could prepare him for the battle he now faces.
For the past three years, Boulter has been fighting a rare form of cancer that was discovered in his knee and spread to his lungs.
“It’s all about normalcy,” says Boulter, who starts each day with a pre-dawn workout. “I try to keep my life as normal as possible. I’ve got a great, wonderful wife and family and friends, a great support structure around me. And I just say every day is a blessing.”
In June 2022, two weeks after his wedding, Boulter underwent a knee replacement. There was a complication.
“There was a cyst in my knee that was giving me problems when I was doing my rehab,” Boulter says. “It was getting bigger. Finally I had the doctor excise it. That September I got the results back that it was a rare form of cancer.”
Since the knee replacement, he has undergone 11 surgeries on his leg and lungs.
“When they removed the cancer from my left knee, they had to take a 13-inch section out of my right side to do plastic surgery on the inside of my knee area where they removed the cancer from,” Boulter says. “I had about five months of chemotherapy — three days for eight hours a day every three weeks. Then I had radiation for 40 days, Monday through Friday, five days a week.
“Then the cancer moved up into my lungs. So I’m doing some chemo right now to see if it’s having any effect on holding it from spreading further.”
Boulter says he has drawn strength from his colleagues.
“It’s the people that I get to work with every day — that’s what has kept me going for 42 years. I love the people I work with. I’ve got a great team and they are such dedicated individuals. It’s a privilege to be able to work with such good people.”
He has been grateful for the support he has received from the Northeastern community. He has also tried to repay that good will.
“It means the world,” Boulter says of the many people who have helped him. “And what I’ve found too is I’ve been able to help some people along. Everybody has something going on. I’ve had some close friends at Northeastern that have been dealing with cancer and we kind of pick each other up.
“When I hear somebody’s down, I give them a call — ‘Hey, how are you doing today? What’s going on?’ We touch base because I’ve got a pretty optimistic viewpoint of life, and I know it’s not easy, especially for people that don’t have the support structure and the number of friends like I have. So I try to be there for other people and to help them get through some tough times.”
Since graduating from high school in 1976, Boulter had been working three jobs — as a machinist, a nightclub bouncer and (on weekends) a gas station manager.
“I thought there has to be a better way,” says Boulter, who sought a football tryout with Northeastern. “I went back to my high school coach who had played football at Northeastern and he set me up with an interview. I came to Northeastern to do my running and weightlifting and all these other things with them — and then I never heard anything.”
Boulter was on the verge of enlisting in the military when he heard back from the Huskies.
“The day before I was going to join the Marines, I took a call from Bo Lyons, the head football coach. He said, ‘Are you still interested in Northeastern?’” Boulter says. “I wound up playing four different positions during my four years at Northeastern. Of course, back then, we weren’t the big monsters that football players are today.”
Boulter graduated in new venture management from what is now known as the D’Amore-McKim School of Business.
“As a student I worked for the housing and grounds department at Northeastern, doing trash and landscaping, and I was also driving trucks for the transportation department,” Boulter says. “By then I’d gotten to know Jack Malone.”
Malone, the longtime associate vice president of facilities at Northeastern who retired in 2021 after 43 years at the university, offered Boulter a full-time job in landscape maintenance.
“I worked that for a year,” Boulter says. “Then I became Jack’s assistant director of building services — landscaping, waste removal, pest control, cleaning. You know, everything.”