Morgan Giannone, a senior at Pennsylvania State University, knew a lot about the school before she even set foot on campus.
Though her parents are Penn State alumni, Giannone also asked some of their friends about the quality of their college experience.
When she visited the campus, she audited a guest lecture by Fox Sports director Rich Russo, a Penn State alum, whose presence showed Giannone the fierce loyalty that Penn State alumni hold to their alma mater, she says.
“One of the main things that everyone stressed to me was how much Penn State alumni love Penn Staters, and how much people who go to Penn State love to hire people from Penn State and meet people from Penn State,” says the 21-year-old broadcast journalism major. “It was just a whole community that extends far beyond graduation.”
Just as Giannone experienced, alumni networks can be a valuable resource for college applicants looking to learn more about schools, experts say.
“They not only get access to information but also to an energy and enthusiasm for our institution that they otherwise wouldn’t have,” says Amy Homkes-Hayes, career development manager for the Alumni Association of the University of Michigan.
While many universities actively involve alumni in recruiting students, she says, applicants can also take the initiative to reach out.
[Discover how to contact alumni to deepen your college research.]
Here are four ways that experts say prospective undergrads can use alumni networks to help them decide where to enroll.
1. Gain student perspectives on a school’s quality and sense of community: When it comes to specifics about daily life on campus, experts say current students and recent grads might be a better resource than those who graduated many years ago. But alumni can still offer insight into the general atmosphere at a school.
“Although the experience today, of course, is different than it was 10 years ago, there are still some underlying institutional norms, history, traditions that an incoming student or a prospective student would share with someone who graduated from Michigan in 1970, for example,” says Homkes-Hayes.
2. Determine the scope of a college’s alumni network: Experts say applicants might ask past students about the quality and quantity of connections they would gain upon graduating, for example.
“The alumni network of an institution has skyrocketed into the upper echelon of categories that prospective students are considering when they choose their institutions,” says Paul J. Clifford, chief executive officer of the Penn State Alumni Association.
[Explore 10 steps to picking the right college.]
Digital technology and social media including LinkedIn make it easier for interested students to learn about alumni resources by, for instance, reaching out to alumni personally, Clifford says. They can also ask a school to connect them with alumni virtually or in person.
For Giannone, having Penn State grads as parents allowed her to understand the tight-knit relationship among many university alumni.
“People from Penn State have been huge influences on his experiences,” she says of her father’s alumni network. “That was something that was super attractive to me when I was picking a school.”
3. Gauge a college education’s role in shaping alums’ career paths: Consulting alumni is a great way to learn about how their majors — or even specific courses or instructors — influenced their ultimate career trajectory, whether or not they ended up pursuing that field, says Rick Clark, director of undergraduate admission at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
“This generation coming out, more than ever — they’re going to make big switches,” says Clark. “So if somebody who’s an alum of that school can say, ‘I started in this, but now I’m doing something totally different, and I feel like that education allowed me to do it’ — that’s really valuable.”
Clifford, of Penn State, says prospective college students should consider asking alumni what activities they did outside of class and how extracurriculars impacted their career goals.
[Learn tips to make your final college decision.]
Alumni can also provide information on whether and how a university’s career services helped them find a job, experts say.
4. Determine alums’ own reasons for attending the institution: Clark says it can be helpful to ask alumni what other schools they considered and what ultimately drew them to the one they chose.
“That’s the spot they’re sitting in — where to apply or where to select after they’ve been admitted,” Clark says of today’s applicants.
Doing so might reveal reasons to enroll they hadn’t previously thought of, he says.
“If they can be asking that same question to as many people as possible,” says Clark, “that’s really of value, so they can get a more rounded understanding of what a school really is.”
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4 Ways to Use Alumni Networks When Choosing a College originally appeared on usnews.com
