Let’s Talk, Part IV

As noted Monday, this week is all about creating a venue for conversation.

My third topic is a request for help and/or advice.  Last summer, I and some of my grad classmates from the Class of 2006 at the Fels Institute of Government at Penn hatched a plan.  We realized our 10-year reunion was coming up, and the wheels started turning about how to celebrate it.  It occurred to us that, in the true spirit of Fels, the best way to reunite was through service, and that the best way to serve would be to be a resource to the Class of 2016.  After all, one of the best things about going to Fels was tapping into its active alumni base, and learning about all of these cool people doing cool things who were willing to help you figure out how to do similar cool things in your own life.

We realized that, while we 2006'ers were still early in our careers, we had a 10-year head start on the 2016'ers, and that collectively we represented a lot of different career paths that would be helpful to share with the 2016'ers.  We also realized, last summer, that those 2016'ers would be arriving on campus that fall, so we got ourselves in gear and worked with Fels staff to set up a LinkedIn group and some mixer events.  It's been fun to reconnect with our 2006 classmates and meet the members of the Class of 2016, and I think they've appreciated having a body of people they can tap into to see what life after Fels is like for people of varied interests.

Some time this fall, we'll be organizing a "speed networking" event, modeled after "speed dating" events, which will be designed to compress the experience of tapping into established professionals into very small chunks of time so that you can get a whirlwind sense of how people got to where they are in their professional careers.  If you are interested in participating, please click here to join our LinkedIn group and keep an eye out for information on this event.  Or, if you can't commit to being there in person, join the LinkedIn group and by doing so your professional information will be in the mix so that folks who take interest in what you do can connect with you and tap into your life story that way.