As you may or may not know, I’m a Scripps College Phonathon manager–yes, I am Sam‘s boss. I call alumnae for six hours every week, manage a shift of other people for three and a half hours and meet with the management team for one hour. Basically, a lot of my week involves the Scripps college alumnae and parent networks and I absolutely love it! I really value my interactions with Scripps alumnae and love the Phonathon team.

Me when people don’t pick up. I get at least 100 dials pretty much every shift…nbd

While Phonathon has been a part of my Scripps experience since the very beginning of my first year, I had never called an alumna outside of Phonathon before today. So I want to talk about how we as Scripps students can benefit from our alumnae network now–while looking for jobs and experiences as well as way before. I’ve emailed alumnae because of Phonathon connections and had coffee with an alumna, but today’s call was entirely my own doing.

I was looking for Scripps alumnae who are lawyers working in Chicago on Life Connections and found a couple alumnae to contact. However, it wasn’t that simple. Life Connections is a fantastic resource, but it can be out of date if the alumna gets a new job and doesn’t update her profile. The alumna I was looking to talk to about law hadn’t updated her profile, which I figured out when the email I attempted to send her could not be sent. This, however, is not the point to give up at! I then searched for her name in the Scripps College Alumnae Association group on LinkedIn and sent her a message through the group. As I expected, she was more than willing to speak with me and we arranged a time.

It was really helpful to speak with an alumna about her experience in law and to hear some of her advice. While I only received one perspective, I am currently reaching out to more alumnae and hope to learn more about what careers in the law are like from them. My conversation with the wonderful alumna was great and she was happy to speak with me. I highly recommend reaching out to alumnae, so I made a list (of course) of tips:

1. Use both Life Connections and LinkedIn to find alumnae to contact–perhaps both! Searching for these alumnae in these systems can be tricky, so try popping by CP&R for some assistance with how to find the alumnae you’d like to contact.

2. Remember that the alumnae who are on the Life Connections database as well as the LinkedIn group (to a lesser extent possibly) are looking to make connections within the Scripps community. You have an in with them–use it!

3. Don’t be overly aggressive or expect a job offer (right away). This is not to say that networking this way cannot yield job offers, but to say that you might want to first ask for advice instead of an internship. Build that rapport and relationship–learn a bit from them–and then see if you feel like it’s a good call to ask about opportunities. (See what I did there?)

4. Have a list of questions ready. It’s so important to be engaging and present over the phone, but you want to keep them talking and learn about their careers, right? So keep those open ended questions coming!

5. Remember to thank them! That follow-up email counts and even thanking the alumna for her time over the phone is important. Keeping in mind that they’re taking time out of their day to speak with you and help you is essential!

Remember to also watch out for ruff connections 😉

This is what I’ve been learning about networking with alumnae on Life Connections and LinkedIn and I hope that you all can use these resources to build connections and learn about potential paths too! Good luck 🙂