We need to get in touch and remain in touch with our alumni. That is something brought home to us in a most direct and clear way this year.
The Mason School of Business community is growing larger and stronger each year, but we have been curiously out of touch with so many of our alumni.
We are actively addressing this in nearly area of the school and one of our most critical areas is career services.
Mark Case, our new MBA Career Services Director is a visionary, experienced director who will focus on students, alumni, and employers. He will team up with a an equally energetic and active undergraduate career development director. The team will address the challenges in career services from many angles. We have seen progress already and are eager to see more.
Recently we experienced a setback when we were dropped from the Financial Times rankings due to too few alumni submitting completed surveys. (The Financial Times only considers surveys that are fully completed.)
We were simply not considered for evaluation because we had too few surveys from alumni.
Our performance last year was up in a number of dimensions and it is likely that we would have risen in the ratings, but the impression left with prospective students might be that we have fallen in the rankings. This is unfortunate for us and is an indication of our failure to maintain adequate contact with this significant group.
We are taking immediate steps to ensure this does not happen again.
In future briefings, I would like to talk more about a number of new mechanisms that we have for alumni to provide us input — input that we are anxious to receive.
I would also like to hear from our alums about what we could do for them and what we could have done differently when they were here.
Please join the conversation. Write me back here.
I look forward to hearing from you.