>> 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.