Assistant Director of Student and Young Alumni Programs and 1844 Society’s staff Adviser Braden Van Dyke.
The Alumni Relations Program will reopen its student-alumni liaison program this summer, giving current students the opportunity to connect with alumni.
“College means partnership. That partnership doesn’t just end once you graduate; this is a lifelong partnership that students have with the college,” said Braden Vandyke, assistant director of student and young alumni programs and 1844 Society’s staff adviser. “We want to engage alumni no matter where they are geographically or generationally, and one of the ways we think is a great way of engaging them is by going to where they are.”
The alumni office is looking primarily for students in the Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois area, and the program will pay students $50 for each alumni they meet with, says Vandyke.
“The idea of it is that we hire students, contract them really, because it’s not your traditional nine to five job,” Vandyke said. “The hired students are given a list of alumni in their area to reach out to and set up meetings with. It could be over coffee, or a meal, or anything of that type.”
Ben Wilson ’22, reporter for the Washington Free Beacon and former editor-in-chief of The Collegian, participated in the program during the summer of 2019.
“It was great to go talk with alumni from the school and just tell them about my experience as a student. And I think it was good for them to hear a student perspective,” Wilson said. “It was a new perspective for me, as I had just finished my freshman year at the time, and it gave me a new awareness of the different Hillsdale experiences that many of our alumni had.”
Hillsdale College admissions counselor Greta Dornbirer ’22 also participated in the program during the summer of 2019. She said she learned a lot about the college from the alumni she met with.
“The Hillsdale many of the alumni attended in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s is a different Hillsdale than today,” Dornbirer said. “So meeting with a current student, I think it reminds them of their college experience, and then they’re hopefully more likely to get involved in other alumni things in the future, because it’s great for us to keep alumni involved in the school and it’s such a unique opportunity to be able to share with them —f rom a student’s perspective — what Hillsdale is like today.”
Dornbirer said she came away from her summer with positive memories and new relationships with alumni, some of which lasted beyond the summer.
“There was one lady who I went out to lunch with and she was so nice and so sweet,” Dornbirer said, “And she ended up visiting campus later in the year and dropped me off this little gift and it was just so sweet.”
Out of the several meetings Wilson had that summer, he said one stuck out in particular.
“There was one man I contacted, and he was like ‘come on over to my house and we’ll go out on my boat,’ so I went over and spent that evening in this beautiful boat with this guy and a bunch of his frat brothers and they were just reminiscing about their glory days,” he said.
Ultimately, the program aims to draw alumni back and to reconnect them with the college, said Vandyke.
“Alumni are the chief beneficiaries of the college–they are what we as a college produce,” Vandyke said. “And obviously, we always want to welcome alumni back to campus, but sometimes that’s not possible, so we want to come to them. Our ultimate goal with these meetings is just to reconnect alumni with the college, and what better way to do that than with the students themselves.”
