NETWORKING is not just for recent graduates or job seekers.
Online networking offers an easy way to find and reconnect with classmates, sorority sisters, fraternity brothers, teammates, and other friends from your days as a student. It is also a convenient means of reaching post-college alumni friends you have lost touch with. Staying connected is now easier to do than ever.
The best way to find alumni you already you know—and to be found by them—is to register with the William & Mary Alumni Association's my1693.com site and add yourself to one or more class year groups. Then you can search the online directory, leave messages, and connect with other registered classmates. As of February 2009, about one third of the 18,500 undergraduate alumni that graduated between 1985 and 1995 had registered with the WMAA. Click here to register at my1693.com.
Just behind this are Facebook and LinkedIn—and we rank them below the WMAA service only because they are not official and do not have the same reach. But they are growing very rapidly and they are much more flexible and useful in some ways.
We started a LinkedIn group for 8595 late in 2008, with forums and a searchable membership roster. Click here to join the 8595 group on LinkedIn.
We also recently created an 8595 group on Facebook, as well. Facebook's popularity with our demographic has shot from very low to quite high in less than a year's time, so we decided to ride the wave. Click here to join the 8595 group on Facebook.
Other social networking sites that allow you to easily search for other W & M alumni include Classmates.com, Alumni.NET, and others. Some of these services will add you to their mailing lists, so make sure you read the terms and conditions of membership before you proceed.
Again, of all of the popular sites that allow searching by alma mater, LinkedIn is the one most geared toward business networking and useful interaction, and it has a convenient way for you to find and add alumni and get referrals from their contacts. If you are looking to link up with other senior executives, attorneys, consultants, administrators, officials, researchers, and other W & M alumni in the business world, take a look at LinkedIn.
If you are mainly interested in catching up with friends you've lost touch with and connecting a face to a name, try Facebook. Just be sure to review your privacy settings when you set up your account so that you are in control of who sees what.