| Departments — President’s Report | Spring 2008 |
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The Strongest Link Eighty years later, we find ourselves making the same plea for alumni to stay in touch with the School—and with each other. But we now have communication tools far more elaborate than Garland’s trusty fountain pen, and we are hoping to exploit them to bring members of the Harvard Medical School community a little closer to one another, no matter their geographic address. During my tenure as president, I have worked with Council members to establish a virtual community of HMS alumni. A year ago the Harvard Medical Alumni Association redesigned and reinvigorated its website, and now the Bulletin has an online presence as well. We have been working with Post.Harvard, the University-wide alumni website, to create additional avenues for communication. These websites are a good beginning; not merely a database, each has been designed with the goal of bringing alumni together. The Bulletin’s “Connect the Docs” section in particular is aimed at forging links among alumni, faculty, and students. But these websites represent only a sliver of what we hope to provide. We plan to launch an e-newsletter, for example, that will bring content updates to interested alumni—such as the online availability of the latest Bulletin, innovations in “Connect the Docs,” or a newly available alumni resource—and offer other relevant information, including details about upcoming reunions and news about individual alumni. We also envision an e-community with even greater potential, one that will help us foster such initiatives as the cultivation of mentoring relationships between students and alumni, a clearinghouse of alumni willing to host students interviewing for residencies outside of Boston, an exploration of service opportunities, and a forum for discussions on important issues in health care and medical education. My successor as president, Steven Weinberger ’73, shares my interest in building this alumni interaction space. We hope that our work in developing online connections will prove as successful as several other recent Alumni Council initiatives. When Steven Schroeder ’64 served as president, for example, he brought his passion and energies to bear on the issue of student debt, and the Council helped spark renewed attention to relieving the financial burden on HMS students. And last year, A. W. Karchmer ’64 led the Council in working with Sanjiv Chopra, the faculty dean in the HMS Department of Continuing Education, to develop some terrific continuing education benefits for HMS alumni. Although these legacies serve to define the contributions of past presidents William W. Chin ’72 is vice president for discovery research and clinical investigation at Eli Lilly and Company. Photo caption: Alexis Moore and Dan Drzymalski get into the swing of things during the Dance Off of Doom. Photo: © iStockPhoto.com (story top); Steve Gilbert |
and Council members, the issues they tackled were ones that drew on the concerns—and wishes—of many alumni. We believe our efforts to pull graduates together using today’s communication tools also respond to those needs and hopes by helping alumni remain grounded in their profession and linked to their classmates while they circle the globe on their missions of healing.
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