A Colgate Couple 13 Years in the Making
In the fall of 2004, Matt Sloane ’07 returned to Colgate for his sophomore year with directions from a family friend: “Take care of Eileen Kelly.”
Kelly, an incoming first-year and fellow Long Island native, had tutored the friend’s teenage son in Spanish.
“He told me, ‘She’s a nice girl. Go introduce yourself and make sure she’s getting acclimated OK,” remembers Sloane. So on Kelly’s first night at Colgate, Sloane stopped by her room in Stillman Hall.
“I remember opening the door and thinking, ‘He’s really handsome!” says Kelly, laughing. After making introductions, Sloane and some friends joined Kelly and her roommates at the Jug for a night of revelry — but not romance.
“We had fun together in a big group, but nothing more developed,” Kelly says.
And so it went for the remainder of their Colgate days. Kelly, a bubbly extrovert, quickly established a large circle of friends and rarely crossed paths with the more introverted Sloane, who, by his own admission, “spent most of my time in the dorm studying math.”
After graduation, Kelly started her career in finance with Unilever, first in New York and later in Buenos Aires, where she lived for more than six years. Meanwhile, Sloane was also working abroad — as a fashion model in Milan, Italy.
Sloane enjoyed an exciting few months in the fashion world before returning to the States to pursue the academic route as he’d always planned. He enrolled in Columbia University’s structural engineering master’s program, staying on to earn his PhD.
By 2017, Kelly had moved back to New York, as well, and into a role with Reuters, serving as the company’s global business development manager. She had also founded WingIt, a travel app for budget- friendly trips. That spring, Kelly was invited to speak at a conference for female-founded start-ups — and a LinkedIn post about the event caught Sloane’s attention.
“It was impressive,” he says. “I commented something congratulatory. I thought it was amazing that Eileen was doing these big things.”
The compliment led to a messaging exchange, during which Sloane and Kelly discovered that they were both living in New York City — and both single. They soon met up for drinks and spent hours talking about their travels and careers.
“She had the exact same smile I remembered from college,” says Sloane. “And it was clear we shared a lot of the same values.”
Kelly felt the connection too. “We hadn’t seen each other in 13 years, but after that first date, I knew I wanted to marry him.”
The relationship grew, and by summer 2019, when the couple returned to Colgate for the Bicentennial Reunion, Sloane popped the question during a walk down Willow Path.
They made arrangements for a 200-guest campus wedding set for April 2020 — a plan ultimately derailed by COVID-19. Instead, they opted for a more intimate affair. With 25 close friends and family members in attendance, they tied the knot in an outdoor ceremony near their home in Summit, N.J., that June.
“We considered waiting it out to see how the pandemic developed, but we were just eager to get married,” Kelly says. “We had waited long enough.”
It was also around this time that Sloane felt pulled toward his lifelong dream of serving in the military. Then a full-time engineer, he discovered the Navy’s Direct Commission Officer (DCO), a leadership training program that allows civilians with specialized skills to become military officers. Sloane qualified for the DCO program, and he entered Officer Development School in 2021 — the same year their first son arrived, followed 19 months later by another baby boy.
Today, the couple balances family life with their careers, Sloane as a researcher with Deloitte and a reserve officer for the Navy, and Kelly as head of product strategy at Dow Jones.
And though it took them 13 years to come back together, Sloane and Kelly feel grateful to have reconnected when they did.
“We’re both driven people, and we had a lot of things we wanted to accomplish in our careers before settling down,” she says. “We had these incredible experiences on our own, and now it feels amazing to be creating new experiences together.”
When Sloane was considering the Navy’s DCO Program, a friend suggested he grab coffee with an incoming Navy recruit who lived nearby. That was Jon Kozy ’03 — coincidentally, half of another Colgate couple with wife Lauren Price ’05 Kozy. After surviving six weeks of boot camp together, Kozy and Sloane — and their wives — have become close friends.