Director of Husky Alumni Network, University of Connecticut

>> My name is Joshua Proulx. I am a political science and French major from UConn, 2005. I came to UConn in 2001 with a goal of finding myself in a leadership role of some sort, obviously looking towards politics. I now am working for the UConn Alumni Association, here on campus and stores. My role is alumni career services, networking, mentorship, entrepreneurial, alumni and student start-up concepts. And I also work with the legislative grass roots advocacy that UConn basically has. The alumni network is 230,000 alumni worldwide. We have chapters all over the world, so we have active and engaged alums in different parts of the country, wherever that might be. And my role, really, is to tie them all together and help them understand that UConn alums and Huskies want to help huskies no matter where they are. So, my role is really to tie the network to each other in the way that they can help each other for their careers, moving forward, advancement, career development, those type of areas. Specific ways we do that, we have our online tools. We have our UConn Alumni Career Network, where alums have volunteered to share their career experiences with fellow students so they can log into the system that we have at UConnalumni.com, and basically find out who they want to talk to that have volunteered, what their fields are, their major, where they started, where they went, send them a message, basically asking to touch base, and find out how they got to where they are. We also have our LinkedIn group, which everybody seems to be moving forward with professional social media. Over 16,000 people in one group that they can obviously network with, reach out to, obviously for business purposes, whatever the case might be. And then we hold networking nights throughout the country, throughout the world, as well as different areas, different involvement, opportunities that they have, game watches, things of that sort. A busy day here on campus usually involves phone calls and meetings with alums, helping with career advising, opportunities for networking, connecting them to various business partners that the university has, working with students, connecting them to alums, helping them to open their eyes to the fact that the 230,000 alums, pretty much every single one of them, will have a conversation with whatever they might be doing on their given day for their course of employment. A lot of it will be tending to the social media responses that are out there through LinkedIn, as well as reaching out to planning various things such as alumni career webinars, planning some of these networking events, working with the local chapters in the area to put these events on.