Marlborough Student Turns Family Loss Into Nursing Path

MARLBOROUGH, MA — A Marlborough student at Endicott College is turning grief, family history and hands-on experience into a path toward nursing.

Kyle Ando, a 2026 exercise science major and former member of Endicott’s men’s lacrosse team, lost his father in 2019 and arrived at the Beverly college still grieving, according to Endicott College. He found support through lacrosse, later studied in Japan to connect with his father’s background and decided to pursue nursing after an internship at a Beverly physical therapy clinic.

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“If you’re on a sports team here, you automatically have 50 friends,” Ando said, according to Endicott. His younger brother, Marcus Ando, a 2027 Endicott student, later joined the men’s lacrosse program as a student assistant coach and manager.

Ando’s father, Yoshitaka Ando, was an athletic trainer at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School for 33 years and also coached his son in youth lacrosse. One of his frequent sayings, “Such is life,” became a motto for Ando, who wrote his Endicott admissions essay about the phrase and had it tattooed on his arm in Japanese.

“What he meant is that things inevitably do not go your way in life,” Ando said. “It’s important to be resilient.”

Ando was raised in Marlborough. His father immigrated from Japan to Massachusetts as a teenager, but rarely spoke Japanese with Ando and his siblings or shared many stories about his childhood, according to Endicott.

During his sophomore year, Ando began taking Japanese classes at Endicott. He later joined a two-week study tour to Japan, where he met Japanese relatives in person for the first time in Yokohama, his father’s birthplace.

“It was the best time of my life,” Ando said. “I understood a lot more about my dad after I visited Japan. Learning about the cultural values there made my dad make sense in a whole new way.”

Back at Endicott, Ando completed an internship at Orthopaedics Plus Physical Therapy in Beverly, where he helped patients begin exercises before treatment. The experience pushed him toward nursing.

“It was by far my most rewarding internship,” Ando said. “I realized then that in my career I need to be working directly with patients and that’s what led me to nursing.”

Ando’s thesis examines the connection between emotional well-being and arthritis. Next year, he plans to begin an accelerated nursing program and hopes to work in pediatrics.“My main takeaway is that I just want to be able to make an impact with the same breadth that my dad did,” Ando said, “but in my own way.”

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