Criminal Justice Alum Takes a ‘Counter Intuitive’ Career Path

05/28/2025
By Ed Brennen

Much like a small-town hardware store, there isn’t a lot of wasted space in the cozy confines of Counter Intuitive Records, the shop that UMass Lowell alum Jake Sulzer ’15 opened earlier this year in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Shelves and display cases are brimming with vinyl records, CDs, cassette tapes, retro video games, DVDs, VHS tapes and the occasional toy. The pale pink walls are decorated with album covers and Counter Intuitive T-shirts and tote bags. A vintage Cosmic Thrill Seeker pinball game doubles as a shelf for baseball caps.

Sulzer started Counter Intuitive as an independent record label shortly after earning a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from UML. In the decade since, the label has released 130 albums by 75 artists from as far away as Japan, Spain and Sweden. Mom Jeans, a Berkeley, California-based alternative/indie rock band that Sulzer signed in 2016, has 2.4 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

After running the label from his childhood home in Maynard, Massachusetts, and then his apartment in Allston, Massachusetts, Sulzer opened the brick-and-mortar store and headquarters last February in Brookline. It’s not just a place to buy music and merch, he says, but also a community hub where people can “get a glimpse behind the curtain” and learn more about their favorite Counter Intuitive bands.

“It’s been unreal. We had a line out the door on opening day. It was one of the best days of my life,” Sulzer says from behind the counter on a recent Friday afternoon as he was preparing to host his first in-store live-stream for one of his label’s artists, Prince Daddy & the Hyena.

Sulzer has known the punk rock group from Albany, New York, since his UML days, when he would help them book gigs at Uncharted and other venues around Lowell. Sulzer eventually signed the band and has twice played with them on tour, first on drums in 2017 and then on bass during a 2023 tour of Asia.

“It was awesome — one of the many things that I’ve been grateful to experience from this,” he says.

“This” is something Sulzer never dreamed of when heading into college. After an unsuccessful start as a business major, he tried again as a criminal justice major with a concentration in homeland security.

“My friend’s dad worked for FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency), and he would get dispatched to help people when there was a natural disaster. I thought that sounded like a cool line of work,” Sulzer says.

Outside of class, though, Sulzer found himself pulled toward UML’s music scene. 

“There are so many talented musicians at UMass Lowell, and I just wanted to find ways to play music with them,” says Sulzer, whose friends Jess Hall ’17 (music performance) and Tom Stevens ’17 (English) were in a band called Oldsoul, which has gone on to release three albums with Counter Intuitive.

During his senior year, Sulzer came across an online demo from a local band, Bay Faction, who were studying at the Berklee College of Music. Sulzer reached out and asked if he could release their album on vinyl.

“I collected vinyl, but I had never put out a record. It was just a desperation shot in the dark,” he says.

The band took him up on the offer. So Sulzer used his savings (along with the money he was earning from a full-time sales job with a lab equipment manufacturer) to put out the record.

“It was extremely well-received and just kind of snowballed from there,” says Sulzer, who launched Counter Intuitive Records as a full-time endeavor that September. He chose the name, he says, after months of aggravating deliberation, finally realizing that stressing over the name was “counterintuitive” to his goal of “releasing good music.”

As the label approaches its 10-year anniversary, Sulzer is thankful he took that leap of faith. He now has a distribution deal with Sony, he’s toured the world with some of his label’s bands, and he’s been able to build his own storefront from scratch.

While it’s not the typical career path of a criminal justice grad, Sulzer says the true value of his UML degree went beyond the classroom. 

“It’s cliché, but college is about more than education. It's about the experience of figuring out who you are and being exposed to different people from different backgrounds from all over the world,” he says. “Even if my education didn’t end up applying directly to my working life, the experience I had in college was invaluable.”