Faith Lyons (MAC ’24) was used to crying alone.
When she arrived at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School for her Master of Accounting Program (MAC) orientation, she was mourning the death of her mother, Wilma Williams, and her sisters, 9-year-old Kaleigh and 11-year-old Mozella, in a car accident.
Her mom was her compass, the one who kept her on track and helped her find her true north.
Suddenly, everything in Lyons’ life felt uncertain. The COVID-19 pandemic struck. Dealing with her grief and the loss of her family, she couldn’t fully focus on her work as a consultant with Triage Consulting Group in Atlanta and resigned.
Consulting had been a natural fit for Lyons. She enjoyed problem-solving and connecting with clients. After just a year at Triage, she had been quickly promoted to a senior consultant.
Then that all slipped away, too.
“From the moment my mom died, I thought my life was over,” says Lyons. “But I knew I had to get over the fear of what comes next. My mom never accepted anything less than 100%. ‘If it’s something you want, you’ve got to give your all,’ she said. She always believed I could do that.”
So, Lyons did. On the first day of MAC orientation, she discovered she wouldn’t have to do it alone. That’s when she met fellow student Madias Loper (BSBA ’23, MAC ’24). They went to UNC Student Stores, and she bought a Carolina coffee mug. Back at her apartment, Lyons opened up to Loper about her mom and sisters.
He cried with her.
“I didn’t expect to have that when I came here, to meet someone that first day who got it, who understood my experience,” she says. “I felt so alone and so far away from my support system. I moved away from family and friends to come here. But right away at Carolina, I had friends. I had family.”
“Right away at Carolina, I had friends. I had family,” says Lyons.
Lyons’ mom had instilled the importance of higher education in her children. The car accident occurred while she was traveling back home from visiting a teacher friend to help Mozella with a school assignment.
She listened to her mom. Lyons graduated with a degree in mathematics from Spelman College in 2018 and started working at Triage the following month. After she resigned from Triage in 2020, it took her just two months to find a job as an operations consultant for Guidehouse in Atlanta. While there, she met a few CPAs and started doing some auditing.
Lyons, who grew up in San Mateo, Florida, had been living in Atlanta for 10 years and could have easily stayed for 10 more, but after her mom’s death, she needed to be in a completely different space.
“I realized that I needed to go to grow,” she says. “I love to experience different things, and I wanted to remind myself of that and know that I can stand on my own. I was very dependent on other people to hold me up. I needed to prove to myself that I’m still strong enough to do it on my own.”
Lyons had made such an impression at Triage that her former boss, Sean Alavi (MBA ’99) wrote her a letter of recommendation for the MAC Program and told her about its rigor. “Carolina was like home to him,” she says. Another coworker, Nick Pianovich (MBA ’22), also recommended UNC Kenan-Flagler for the rigor of its graduate programs.
It took just a few months for the Business School to feel like home to Lyons, too. Her friendliness and outspokenness began to poke through the surface. She had always been social — that person whose personality shines even in a large crowd or classroom. She talked to everyone, and everyone wanted to talk to her. Her light began to return.
She quickly was on a first-name basis with the Café McColl staff, professors, staff and Dean Mary Margaret Frank (BSBA ’92, MAC ’92, PhD ‘99). Her accounting professor knew about Lyons’ struggle and asked her what she could do to be a better professor for her during the year.
Lyons’ charisma, drive and grit drew people in, and soon she felt it was a safe place to share the rest of her as well, especially her deep struggle as she grieved the loss of her family.
She dove into her studies, concentrating on audit and financial analysis and reporting.
“I wanted to really hone my skills, beef them up and rebuild my confidence as the businesswoman that I knew I was,” says Lyons. “And academically I got way more than I expected from this whole journey. UNC Kenan-Flagler helped remind me to quiet all the noise. I felt my confidence restored.”
Lyons speaks at the Bell Hall topping off ceremony.
She started mentoring fellow students, was named the president of the Master of Accounting Student Association and represented the MAC Program when she spoke at an event when the final structural beam was placed on Steven D. Bell Hall.
In October 2024, she moved back to Atlanta to begin work as an audit associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers. She also returned to the home she bought before the accident.
“I’ve been challenging myself for the past year, and I learned that I’m stronger than I thought I was,” she says. “I was stronger in my vulnerability and stronger for letting go of perfectionism and accepting support when I needed it the most. But I’ve also learned that fighting to get back to how I was when my mom was here didn’t make sense. I was trying to go back somewhere that you can’t go back to. You have to keep going forward.
“There have been many moments where I didn’t know how things were going to happen or what was going to come next. Carolina changed that. Carolina will always be on my mind. Carolina has my heart.”