I’m currently in Washington D.C. visiting a handful of HTC and Ohio University alumni. It’s been a dreary, rainy day, as this picture shows:
But it’s also been a lot of fun meeting with a half-dozen alumni who live here in the D.C. area. Although these visits are cumulatively exhausting, they’re also invigorating — I’m truly inspired by their stories of being at OHIO as well as their tales of their professional success after graduation. I love being able to return to Athens with these stories to share with our students. It’s important that they know that they too can have successful careers after finishing their time here.
A substantial part of any dean’s job nowadays is doing development work, a euphemism for fundraising. It’s not my job to ask for money on a literal level. Rather, my job is to engage with alumni, keeping them informed about all of the exciting things happening in HTC and inspiring them to want to invest in our current students’ futures. (Then, when and if the time is right, the Development Office swoops in to “make the ask.”)
I knew when I applied for the dean’s job that I would need to do development work, but I honestly didn’t know what that really meant. To some degree, it was just the thing I knew I should write about in my application letter and talk about in my interviews. I certainly didn’t know how much fun it would be to visit our alumni and talk to them about our students and their own professional accomplishments. I’m sure every college dean thinks their alumni are interesting people, but mine seem to be especially fun to visit. So far, they’ve all been really cool people who have had fascinating lives and who genuinely want to know more about our current students.
This trip has reminded me that the key to alumni relations and development is communication. I and my team have to do a good job of communicating with our alumni and friends, keeping them informed about our students’ stories in between my visits. To some degree, that’s what I hope this blog helps us do. I hope to expand our communication in the coming months (but more on that in later posts).
