An Alumni Symposium - An Innovative Approach to Connecting, Engaging, and Celebrating our Graduates

Virginia Tech’s Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health (TBMH) graduate program recently celebrated their ten-year anniversary. As a very young, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary program without a home department, school, or college, we had the task of developing an alumni engagement event and plan that would capture the attention of the alumni, invite them to participate, and provide us the chance to collect data for us moving forward. We created our anniversary weekend celebration focused around an Alumni Symposium. This symposium was open to the public and showcased 6 selected alumni to present on the topic of their choice. Their only task was to link their topic to how TBMH shaped their current professional self. We highlighted them as distinguished guests to current faculty & students, collect contact data, collect qualitative data on how our particular program set them up for success, begin developing a current student-alumni network, and gave our alumni a professional invited talk on their CV/Resume. In this session, we want to walk through our thought process and how this was developed from scratch (no home department or history to help!) and showcase its success. We also want to brainstorm with everyone on the next steps to maintain momentum.