Dartmouth College has an institutional gap when providing career support to alumni.
How might the Office of Alumni Relations better support career-seeking alumni through their existing framework of facilitating connections between alumni?
Through extensive research, the Design Corps team identified a series of opportunity areas and subsequent recommendations that they compiled for the Alumni Relations Office.
These opportunities included engaging with centers on campus that wish to collaborate with alumni networks, but are prohibited from doing so according to their charters and facilitating programming for young alumni that would encourage unstructured, natural conversations.
Project Details
Project Partner: Walter Palmer, Director of Dartmouth for Life in the Office of Alumni Relations
Project Timeline: 3 terms
In the fall, the team conducted primary and secondary research to learn about the career needs of alumni and the current state of alumni career programming on campus.
In order to understand the needs of Dartmouth alumni and the current offerings on campus the team identified and conducted interviews with a series of stakeholders, including:
The team explored how other colleges and corporate settings cultivate alumni networks. Through this research, they developed an understanding of strengths and opportunities for Dartmouth’s Alumni Office.
The team experimented with a career email digest to connect alumni and reduce the stress of the job search process. They are also preparing recommendations for future alumni career programs and outreach strategies to promote the Alumni Relations office’s current offerings.
Project Constraints:
The Alumni Relations team was not fully staffed, making it challenging to launch additional programming or new initiatives. The office also has to work within constraints imposed by the college (e.g., cannot communicate with current students, predetermined brand and style guides, etc.)
Biggest Challenges:
Scheduling and coordination, narrowing scope, working within constraints of the Alumni Relations office
Following their interviews and research, the Design Corp team produced a series of recommendations. Two recommendations and the insights leading to them are featured below.
Campus Centers
Insight: Since the charter of many on-campus centers limits their engagement with alumni, centers express strong interest in partnering with Alumni Relations to connect with Dartmouth’s alumni network.
Recommendation: The students suggested building specific Dartmouth community networking to connect Alumni and Campus centers. The students outlined ways to do this through creating career “hubs” on Dartmouth’s Alumni platform and Dartmouth Connect and then integrating campus centers through those sites as a way to support their involvement. It was found that alumni are more likely to connect to specific campus centers than general alumni support for career help , so through this integration, campus centers could offer their industry-specific programming and resources and be able to effectively continue the communication after students graduate.
Recent grads and Young Alumni:
Insight: The most fruitful connections come from organic interactions with people, especially alumni who could provide help.
Recommendation: Interviews with young alumni and recent graduates found that the best connections come from organic interactions with others, especially older alumni. The team recommended steering away from formalized networking events and moving toward collaborative events that include activities where people can organically engage with each other. The team proposed possible ways to do this through programming that could allow for natural conversations. Students also recommended incorporating this into Dartmouth Connect through automatic feeds that would be easily accessible and a better way to casually interact with alumni. In conjunction with natural conversations, the team found that recent graduates valued hearing failure’s and struggle’s from older alumni. Therefore, the team proposed various ways to integrate this content through honest “coffee chats”, “vent sessions” and other Dartmouth Connect discussion boards. These programs and additions to Dartmouth Connect would allow opportunities to hear real testimonials and discuss and engage casually with other alumni.
“It was such a great experience to have collaborated with Dartmouth Alumni Relations and getting to work with such amazing Dartmouth alumni. As a team, we were able to see the design process in action on a project that would really help people. As designers, we grew our skills in interviewing, ideating, and recalibrating when our project shifted but still being able to produce something that would be helpful to our partners.” - “Alumni Relations” Design Corps Team