Happy to Help

Alumni gladly host visiting Maxwell students during the spring networking trip.

By Jessica Murray

During spring break this year, nearly 70 Maxwell graduate students headed to Washington, D.C., and New York City for the annual networking trip — a busy week of site visits, coffee chats, and one-on-one meetings, hosted by the types of organizations where students hope to soon start careers.

Each year, the five-day trip is planned and organized by the students themselves. They have a little help from Maxwell’s career development and alumni relations staffs. But an even more important source of help is Maxwell alumni. Many of the organizations that students visit each year have alumni placed within them. It’s a boon. Those alumni make the challenging business of finding site-visit hosts and finalizing visit details a whole lot easier.

It’s no small undertaking. During the 2018 trip, for example, almost 35 organizations in Washington and New York hosted the students; among those 35, Maxwell alumni played a role at 25 sites. This allowed the students to build an experience both deep and broad. In D.C., site visits included NGOs, think tanks, and government agencies and offices — among them the American Red Cross, the World Bank, and the Environmental Protection Agency. In New York, visits took place at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Hagerty Consulting, and Fitch Ratings, among others. Those are all examples of organizations where Maxwell alumni hosted.

The involvement of alumni makes the trip more impactful for everyone involved. The students not only gain access to the organizations, but they encounter alumni role models — recent graduates now living the professional lives to which the students aspire. The alumni, meanwhile, hear from students about life at Maxwell. It’s a chance to reconnect with the School and their own recent pasts.

This article appeared in the spring 2018 print edition of Maxwell Perspective © Maxwell School of Syracuse University.