Alumni Relations
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The Alumni Relations committee is responsible for planning and coordinating events to foster intimate bondings between CSK members within the university and graduated alumni. Alumni Relations’ main initiatives consist of facilitating the Mentorship Program, hosting professional development events, and planning Alumni Mixer at the end of the school year.
To effectively engage all the CSK alumni within your program, we encourage you to create an alumni roster that can track members’ name, cohort year, school and personal email, and any other details that you may see fit. You can utilize this we created as a starter. Outside of email communications, you may also consider creating a slack or discord group with all the alumni to encourage more free-flowing conversations. Example channels may include but are not limited to advice, announcements, and general.
With stable communications among the cohorts, we can now officially start the initiatives portion. For the mentorship program, there are two tracks available, where one is connecting CSK upperclassmen (usually juniors and seniors) to lowerclassmen while another is connecting professionals (not necessarily having to be CSK alumni) to CSK members (freshmen to seniors). The mentorship program is valuable in that it helps members gain guidance throughout the school year while keeping them more engaged past the CSK week program itself. To help ensure that members are truly benefitting from the mentorship program, we encourage you to host check-ins throughout the year and brainstorm fun activities like bingo board to keep mentorship pairs engaged.
For the professional development events portion, some example projects may include but are not limited to resume workshops, student panels for internship/job search, leetcode practice sessions, and professional panels centered around a theme like “How to break into software engineering.” We highly recommend starting to brainstorm event lineups during the summer so that you can have more time to reach out to people and smoothly implement these projects during the school year. It’s also helpful if you can plan these events in a blend of in-person and virtual styles so that you can ensure reaching more people that might not be physically around your university’s area.
And last but not least, for the alumni mixer, we invite over graduated alumni and current members for a casual bonding session and end-of-the-year alumni appreciation dinner together. You may choose to include activities like crafts, free mingling sessions, and alumni panels. Please make sure that while catering for the event, you take into consideration food allergies for the participants. It’s good practice if you label the dishes clearly with potential allergens so participants will also be more informed.
If you’ve decided to include an alumni panel within your mixer event, you can refer to this email template that we had for our mixer event in 2023 for inspiration.
Hi everyone!
We're super excited to welcome you as panelists to our Alumni Mixer Dinner event. The Q&A panel would be [insert time duration] long and hosted at [insert location] from [insert start time] to [insert end time]. Below is a more detailed list of panel questions to help you prepare for the event. We'll be asking these questions below as time permits and then open up the floor for members to ask their own questions. Please also provide a blurb and a headshot of yourself as we would love to introduce you to our members before the panel officially starts. Thank you so much for your support and we look forward to seeing you soon! :)
Best wishes,
CSK Alumni Relations 2023
Over the course of your undergraduate journey, what inspired you to pursue the career that you are in now?
Searching and applying for internships could be overwhelming sometimes, what was the process like when you were getting your first professional internship/role?
What was your first internship and what were some important lessons/insights that you gained from this experience?
Many of our members are interested in different ways to explore CS through applied studies such as CS + bio, linguistics, or economics. If you had a similar experience with not being sure how to explore CS (either in the sense of applications within CS or in the sense of exploring CS and/or other interdisciplinary interests), how did you go about the process and what advice would you give to the members exploring different options?
Is your current job directly related to your college major? In what ways do you think Berkeley prepares you (it could be projects, courses, clubs, etc) for your career?
What does your day-to-day look like in your current job?
What’s the most rewarding part of your job/career?
What is one piece of advice that you would give to your college-student self?