Dartmouth College Office of Alumni Relations: Young Alumni Committee News

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Young Alumni Committee – Alumni Council

Amy Henry '97 (Chair) • Susanne Kandell '00 (Vice Chair) • Errik Anderson '00, '01Th, '02Tu
Jennifer Argenti '99 • Abigail Berniker '03 • Eva Brock '01, '02Th • Lorraine Buhannic '07
Zachary Chestnut '08 • Dave Dookeeram '99 • Martha Gillon '11 • Michael Guzman '06
Sara Hudner '10 • Andrew Kell '10 • Andrew Lane '09 • Niral Shah '08 • Shouonak Simlai '05
Simon Trabelsi '08 • David Wagner '99 • Colleen Wearn '06 • Henry Yan '11

The Committee on Young Alumni collects information and makes recommendations on programs for Young Alumni to further attract their interest and participation in Dartmouth alumni activities. The committee consists of a staff member from the Alumni Relations Office (Committee Secretary) and members of the Alumni Council.

Report from the 198th Alumni Council, May 14–16, 2009: The Young Alumni Committee held an abbreviated meeting just prior to Friday's lunch, due to shifts in schedule to accommodate Dr. Kim's speech to the Alumni Council. In that time, we revisited an ongoing conversation about alumni career services, briefly discussed club leadership opportunities for young alumni, and held an election for our new co-chair.

The committee has been discussing how to fill a need that has become increasingly important for young alumni over the past two sessions: career services specifically geared to alumni. Previous initiatives suggested or begun by the committee have been put on hold due to limited resources at the College. At this meeting, Rex Morey '99, with the Office of Alumni Relations, gave us a "state of" report that included an update on recent budget cuts affecting career services, which will make it even more difficult to obtain resources for alumni. Rex reviewed Dartboard, the update to MonsterTrak, and we briefly discussed ways to make it more relevant to young alumni (e.g., creating an alumni sign-in process that doesn't require entering a Hinman Box; encouraging alumni to post job listings that would be more appropriate to young alumni rather than undergraduates). The committee discussed ways to move this initiative forward, knowing that action might have to wait until the budget rebounds. Zach Chestnut '08 and Phil Mone '02 agreed to lead a subcommittee that would conduct research on previous efforts, other schools' programs, etc., and create a proposal that would recommend a solution, including budget requirements, etc. Ideally, we could workshop this during our next meeting, and have something to present to the larger council and appropriate members of the administration.

While some concern was expressed during our last meeting about opportunities for younger alumni to get involved in club leadership, a brief discussion by committee members, along with a discussion of the way clubs work by Steve Donovan of Alumni Relations, seemed to conclude with an understanding that many of the larger clubs have done a great job not only keeping younger alumni engaged, but also supporting their involvement at the highest levels of their organizations (including a committee member of our own who is the president-elect of the Boston Club!).

Amy Henry '97 will become the 2009-2010 chair and Susi Kandel '00 was elected vice chair of the Young Alumni Committee.
Report from the 197th Alumni Council, December 4–6, 2008: The committee will reassess the current economic climate, alumni needs, and resources available to Career Services (CS) before sending out a survey to examine how alumni utilize that office. Skip Sturman, CS director, and Karen Whittet, assistant director, shared details on alumni utilization: The number of unique contacts with alumni have increased from 18 to 25 percent this year. About one-third of CS resources are dedicated to graduate and professional school advising, areas primarily utilized by alumni. CS has also seen a change in the quality of calls from alumni, many of whom have lost or are concerned about losing their jobs. The increase in contact, however, has not been met with any increased resources dedicated to alumni – CS members currently provide these services of their own accord.

The committee will send an email to all councilors to forward to their constituents regarding the current services available to alumni and ways in which alumni can support CS resources for alumni.

Report from the 196th Alumni Council, May 15–17, 2008: The committee reviewed a young alumni career services survey (prepared by Amy Henry '97 and Rex Morey '89) and provided input and suggested edits. The survey is scheduled to be finalized for distribution in the next several weeks.The committee also reviewed the Alumni Life 101 document.Rex will engage committee volunteers over the next several weeks and work to update the publication for electronic distribution to the graduating class.

The committee unanimously elected Belinda Chiu '98 to serve as chair for next year. Libby Hadzima '06 resigned as vice chair due to schedule conflicts. The committee unanimously elected Amy Henry to serve as vice chair for next year.

Report from the 195th Alumni Council, November 29–December 1, 2007: Skip Sturman (with help from Rex Morey) provided an interesting overview of career services available for alumni. As Skip noted, Career Services is focused on providing service to undergraduate students, but provides assistance to alumni as much as it can. Much of the alumni interaction occurs as a part of grad school advising services. In addition, 8.5 percent of career counseling appointments are with alumni. Alumni also have access to the alumni advisor network; approximately 23,000 out of 40,000 working alumni have volunteered to serve as advisors. Given the career services focus of our session, we keyed in on a few issues:
1. Should the Alumni Council support the creation of a dedicated alumni career services professional (either within Career Services or Alumni Relations)?
There is interest in doing so, and a subset of the committee will explore this issue prior to the next meeting.
2. Should the committee update the Alumni Life 101 document and distribute it to the senior class?
There was debate as to the value of the publication, but it was agreed that it might be useful and the effort involved in updating it would be limited.
3. Is there merit in doing a small-scale survey to determine the merit of Alumni Life 101 and other issues of importance to young alumni?

Rex Morey is assessing the opportunities for conducting a survey and will work with the committee over the next several months.

Report from the 194th Alumni Council, May 17–19, 2007: The Young Alumni Committee met with a short agenda including leadership succession, continuation of Alumni 101 updates, new committee activities, and general updates from Rex Morey '99, associate director of class activities, regarding young alumni initiatives.

Libby Hadzima '06 was elected to serve as co-chair to incoming committee chair Matt Bailey '96 this year and then succeed Matt as committee chair during her third year.

Several committee members volunteered to help draft and update changes to Alumni 101 in the next one and a half weeks in order to have an updated version available for distribution to the Class of 2007 during senior week.

Highlights of Rex Morey's report:
After much work and development, the new alumni Web site will be launched in June, offering considerable enhancements in organization and functionality.
The continued use of InCircle will be evaluated over the coming year due to concern that its usage and benefits may not be commensurate with its ongoing cost.
New technology for alumni email services is also being evaluated in response to feedback on the functionality of the current technology.
A broad discussion was undertaken around the concept of creating “reunions” that all classes can attend each year surrounding a big event weekend during the year other than C&R.Princeton operates a reunion model of this nature which encourages alumni to return to campus annually.There was general agreement that this is a concept worthy of exploration, although it also presents challenges.
The committee selected young alumni career services as the focus of its next purposeful act.The majority of young alumni will switch jobs within one to five years of graduation.While many professional schools (including some of Dartmouth's professional schools) offer robust career services for alumni, the offering to undergraduate alumni at Dartmouth is somewhat limited.Therefore, the committee aims to perform research into best practices in alumni career services and the unique needs of young alumni in order to generate a findings and recommendations document by the December meeting.