(Re)connecting with College Alumni
I graduated back in 1994 from American University in Washington, DC. I confess that I haven’t done the best job of keeping in touch with many of my fellow graduates — actually I can count on one hand the number of classmates I still socialize with regularly. But in recent years I have become a strong supporter of the University and serve on the Advisory Council of the School of Public Affairs at AU.
Recently, however, I came up with an idea of a good way to keep in touch with fellow graduates, as well as to make new connections with other alumni. To that end, I started a blog (Beyond Ward Circle — named after the traffic circle marking the edge of the campus) to feature news for an about AU alums. It will feature news briefs, Q&A, and interviews. In the past few days as I have begun working on it, I have already made some good new connections and spotted many folks who were AU graduates who I hadn’t been aware of.
Alumni interaction has been a key to the success of many of the Ivy League schools over the years, but many other universities and their graduates don’t really take advantage of all that school networking has to offer. I aim to change that for me and other AU graduates, but I suspect that there are many others of you out there who might find similar value in (re)connecting with graduates of your college or university either with a blog or simply with good old-fashioned email and phone calls.