<p>Yikes, typos and ph won’t allow me to edit</p>
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<p>I would probably do the same. Personally, though, I might be more inclined to respond to an email from an unsolicited student / alumnus of my alma mater than I would from someone who I had no connection with at all, or a weak one. (e.g. “Beyphy, I see you took introductory Latin, I took introductory Latin too!” etc.) If they’d ask to meet for lunch, and I’d have the time, I’d be more inclined to accept than I would for someone with whom I had no connection. With a current student / recent alum, I could talk about anything from campus sports to the difficulty of his / her courseload and major. Those things might motivate me to grab lunch with this person that I would probably not meet otherwise.</p>
<p>If I had hiring responsibilities, that doesn’t mean I’d give this person the job I’m hiring for, but I might recommend them to apply for the position if they’re qualified. And if they’re one of the handful of top candidates, all else being equal, a positive impression on me from networking might them the edge over other applicants.</p>
<p>Some posters on here claim things like their alumni networks provide ‘pipelines to Wall St.’ I’ve personally always felt those claims were largely exaggerated though. I can’t imagine many with hiring responsibilities would routinely reject their best applicants for someone who went to their alma mater. And I don’t think the hiring managers on Wall St. are an exception to this either.</p>
<p>So, too, are Colgate and Bucknell. That doesn’t mean that they’re as good as the others, just that they’ve made the effort in recent years or decades.</p>
<p>NYU?</p>
<p>@beyphy: No, people won’t generally pick a clearly inferior candidate from their school over a clearly superior candidate from somewhere else, but if there are openings and a company does on-campus recruiting, alums from the schools that a firm has had success with will usually be sent to recruit candidates from their school. If I feel that my school produces a good number of high quality candidates in my field, all else being equal, I’ll go there to recruit first before another school, though I’ll probably hit a few others.</p>
<p>^ O.K., if that kind of recruiting activity is what we mean by “alumni networking”, then how do we assess it? How do we measure the quantity/quality of this activity by the alumni of any given college?</p>
<p>Recruiting is generally done locally. If I’m in NYC, the places I’d recruit at would probably include NYU, Columbia, maybe Cornell, some Cunys, and maybe some Suny’s; If I’m in LA, it’ll probably be USC, UCLA, perhaps some other UCs (maybe SD / SB,) Some Norcal schools (Stanford / Berkeley; maybe Davis) maybe some Calstates and that’s about it. I can’t imagine many would go out of there way to recruit at their alma mater if it’s a thousand miles or more away.</p>
<p>One of the strongest things I’ve always considered about a strong alumni network is its ability to have large amounts of alumni outside of its own state. Consider Michigan for example. Michigan has over 500,000 alumni, but only 200,000 of those reside in the state of Michigan. That means there are hundreds of thousands of other Michigan alums spread over the U.S. and the world. That could come in handy if you wanted to network with alumni, especially outside of the state of Michigan. In honesty though, I imagine very few alumni actually go to networking events, and even less blindly hit up alumni on places like LinkedIn. So it’s something that’s probably not beneficial to most of the students or alumni. But if you were an aggressive, impressive, and well rounded Michigan alum and you hit up someone like Alexandre on LinkedIn, that might work out well for you ;)</p>
<p>For LACs, I feel that schools that are more “pre-professional” like Claremont McKenna, Colgate, and Washington & Lee tend to have stronger alumni networks than the crunchy, granola type LACs like Oberlin or Bennington College.</p>
<p>For universities, I feel that schools with D-1 football/basketball tend to have more school spirit and stronger alumni networks. I think the alumni networks at schools like Notre Dame, Michigan, Vanderbilt, and USC have stronger alumni networks than NYU, Brandeis, Tufts, and Rochester.</p>
<p>Texas A&M. </p>
<p>The following universities are known for having good alumni networks:</p>
<p>Notre Dame, USC, Michigan, Duke, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, UVA, UT-Austin, UNC, Indiana, Wisconsin, Georgetown, Boston College, Wake Forest, and SMU.</p>
<p>@beyphy This is what I was talking about, Thank you. I’m referring to schools that have that Michigan type networking. Schools that it doesn’t matter where you are in the country, that people will always be everywhere. Any more schools like that?</p>
<p>LinkedIn has a nice feature that allows you to view where Alumni live and work. It’s self-reported data, but it’s folks that are interested in Networking (hence being on LinkedIn). Even Michigan has a strong regional Networking base, that’s weaker in the west (outside of a few major west coast cities) and south. </p>
<p><a href=“https://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/edu/alumni?id=18633&trk=alumni-widget-see-more”>Sign Up | LinkedIn;
<p>“Even Michigan has a strong regional Networking base, that’s weaker in the west (outside of a few major west coast cities) and south.”</p>
<p>No kidding? . </p>