Committee 

December 3–5, 2009

In conference calls prior to this meeting, and in our lunchtime get-together in Hanover, the Young Alumni Committee has been focused on developing a recommendation for how Dartmouth could better support young alumni – and ultimately all alumni – with post-graduate career support. After introductions of new and returning committee members, Amy Henry '97 provided a brief history of the Young Alumni Committee's work on this issue. Specifically:

  • We have heard about the realities that Career Services faces regarding satisfying the needs of the undergraduates with current resources (and concerns that any support the office offers alumni would divert resources from the undergraduates).
  • We developed a survey designed to assess young alumni interest in and attitudes toward career service support, but ultimately decided not to distribute it. We were advised that we were not able to promise that we would actually be doing anything to address alumni's concerns, and did not want to set unrealistic expectations.
  • Finally, we agreed that a smaller team, lead by Phil Mone '02 and Zach Chestnut '08, would investigate the issue further and take the first steps toward developing a recommendation from our committee on what we think should be done. Of course, our proposal will include turn-key recommendations of little to no cost and longer-term ideas.

Phil and Zach presented what they have done and investigated to date.

Then, Mimi Simpson of Alumni Relations provided a comprehensive introduction to all the resources that the College currently offers for alumni, along with a perspective on what seems to be working and what could be improved.

In response to both of these presentations, we had a rich conversation in which both veteran and new members offered perspectives on free tools that might be useful, ways we could communicate the existing offerings to alumni, etc.

As a next step, Phil and Zach are preparing a timeline that will allow us to develop a full proposal to present to the Alumni Council at the spring meeting. We anticipate that this proposal will include recommendations for 1) communication around current offerings, 2) short-term execution, and 3) longer-term consideration. We've also agreed to help Mimi's team pilot a few Web-based changes that are currently in the works.

We briefly discussed and plan to follow up on four other initiatives that the committee previously identified as important:

  1. Helping young alumni find easier ways to get back to campus;
  2. Helping clubs better engage young alumni;
  3. Helping facilitate networking among alumni; and
  4. Developing ideas to engage the older spectrum of young alumni who might have different needs for young alumni events (more family-oriented, etc.).

Finally, we distributed Young Alumni Award nomination forms to ensure that the young alumni across our networks are identified during the search process.