Thank You From the MIT Alumni Association

Joe L. McGonegal

The mission of the MIT Alumni Association is to connect MIT’s 137,000 living alumni with one another and with the Institute, a commitment we take seriously for alumni of all ages, academic degrees, and destinations after leaving Cambridge. We simply cannot fulfill this mission each year without the support and collaboration of countless campus partners.  
While our partnerships may be countless, we can count the MIT faculty and researchers who volunteer their time each year to share news of their research and teaching with alumni for whom an MIT education is a lifelong endeavor.

In our fiscal year ending June 30, 2017, we counted 99 MIT faculty who spoke at alumni gatherings, from our largest events at Tech Reunions, MIT Family Weekend, and the Alumni Leadership Conference, to talks over dinner or post-conference gatherings with alumni clubs and groups near and far. (See the list below.) Beyond speakers, we were also delighted to see over 250 MIT faculty among the attendees at our events this year.

To those in these sets, we say both thank you – and let’s do even more together.
 
Like our colleagues in Resource Development, Alumni Association staff focus on understanding and communicating MIT’s advances in research and education to alumni and friends. This focus is made sharper in the midst of the Campaign for a Better World, one with ambitious donor participation and event engagement goals.

In the alumni education office, we have doubled our efforts to maximize the connections among faculty, researchers, and alumni.  We track all faculty appearances worldwide that we know of on one central calendar, and we alert alumni when faculty are giving public talks or speaking at conferences in their areas. We stay current on research and liaise with organizers of major research conferences. We have doubled production of Faculty Forum Online Webcasts in which alumni can interact virtually with faculty. And we have piloted new kinds of events, both virtual and real-time, for alumni to connect with the research and people who make MIT great.

In this past year, over half of the 22,000 alumni who attended an MIT alumni event did so to engage directly with researchers. If we do our jobs right, this percentage will climb in the years ahead. So we are almost always willing to partner and collaborate with departments, labs, centers, and individual faculty, whether given a week’s notice or a year’s, if it means amplifying their message to our alumni.

Each summer the MIT Alumni Association offers faculty and research staff two ways to connect with us. Our annual Toast to Faculty event in August brings staff and faculty together to reflect on the year past and consider possibilities in the year ahead. Those who could not attend the August event can collaborate with us this year by completing a simple survey. 

Thank you to the following individuals who volunteered to speak at alumni events in the last year. Are we missing your name? Please let us know.

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