“I’m a lawyer who hosts a podcast called ‘Signs from the Other Side,’ so I know what it’s like to feel different,” said Jennifer Fernicola (Fern) Ronay ’02. Her early career followed a classic route for an ambitious daughter of a “100 percent Italian American” family based in Belleville, New Jersey. She earned a degree in accounting, worked at Deloitte in Manhattan, qualified as a CPA, graduated from BC Law, passed the NY and NJ bar exams, and worked in the New York offices of a New Jersey-based law firm.
Reflecting on her younger self, Ronay, 50, said: “I could pass the CPA exam, I could pass the bar exams, but I didn’t know what my passions were, what my strengths really were.” Feeling like a “square peg in a round hole” in the legal and accounting worlds, she took exploratory courses in fiction writing and TV reporting and realized that what most inspired her were “stories about people’s lives and their life lessons and writing about that creatively.”
A move to Chicago kickstarted new career directions. Ronay completed her first novel, blogged for the Chicago Tribune organization, and did on-camera reporting for an online news site. Based in Los Angeles since 2014, she sold her novel, Better in the Morning, and its successor, Better Believe It, and is currently finishing the manuscript of a third. Her fiction reflects a long-term fascination with spiritualism—characters receive guidance in dreams and signs from departed relatives—themes she also explores in her podcast series. These days, Ronay uses her legal training to support her creative endeavors, working remotely in the conflicts department of a large law firm. “It’s been an interesting path—I’m quite grateful for my law degree,” she said.
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