One hour can make a considerable difference
January 23, 2025 — Early in the fall 2024 semester, an email promoting an opportunity for students to connect with alumni caught the eye of computer science major Maria Christina Rodriguez ’26.
Maria Christina Rodriguez ’26
It was for the College’s Student-Alumni Virtual Meetup program, a collaborative effort between the Center for Careers, Life, and Service (CLS) and the Office of Development and Alumni Relations, which allows students to connect with a wide array of alumni in a short amount of time.
The email couldn’t have arrived at a better time for Rodriguez, who had recently changed her concentration from environmental studies to statistics. A great chance to speak with alumni working in or with backgrounds in the statistics field had just fallen into her inbox.
Another bonus, especially for someone whose responsibilities include working as a teaching assistant for computer science courses and developing lesson plans for Grinnell Middle School students as part of the College’s Girls Who Code student organization, was the short time commitment the Meetup program required. She took a few minutes to fill out the brief questionnaire and soon after, she spent around an hour meeting individually with a series of alumni.
The Meetup program, which features a different professional sector each session, enables students and alumni to connect with each other for “speed networking,” a series of 10-minute conversations over the course of an hour. Grinnell first introduced the program in 2021.
Ti Garcia ’25
Unlike Mentor Grinnell, which pairs a student and alum for eight separate meetings, Virtual Meetups use a software platform called Meetaway to match students and alumni in a more rapid-fire format. The platform provides an option to extend the conversation for another round, if both the student and the alum agree.
While the ticking clock can help students and alumni get down to brass tacks, this isn’t solely networking for the sake of networking. Ti Garcia ’25, a computer science major and international student from São Paulo, Brazil, has been contending with a bit of anxiety heading into their final semester.
Although Garcia regularly meets with staff like Senior Director, STEM Career Communities and Analytics Sarah Barks at the CLS regarding career opportunities and life more generally, they began to realize that they didn’t have much experience interacting with alumni (beyond their recent graduate friends). At one of their meetings, Barks mentioned the Meetup program and suggested that speaking with alumni might be a way to remedy that anxiety.
The Meetup program – and keeping in touch with the alums they met through it – became a real source of comfort for Garcia. “Students and alumni are not that far apart,” Garcia says. “Alumni may have more personal experience than us in the world, in industries, and academics, but we’re all on the same wavelength.”
Alex Wood ’97
Alex Wood ’97, who lives in the Denver metro area and has worked in the information security field since graduation, was impressed with how much ground he and the students were able to cover in just 10 minutes. One student, he recalled, was interested in developing a social justice-oriented online community and asked him some really engaging questions about an online community of digital security professionals he’d started.
Wood encourages alumni, particularly those who might have limited time, to give the Virtual Meetups a shot. “The conversations I had were interesting and energizing. I really enjoyed being able to meet and speak with so many students in such a short period of time,” he said.
Nina Ranalli ’26, a political science major and global development studies concentrator from the Chicago area, is no stranger to meeting with alumni and guest lecturers on campus from attending Rosenfield Program events and now serving on its Committee. She too has benefited from both the short form format of the Meetup program as well as the longer format of MentorGrinnell.
Nina Ranalli ’26
She met with an alum who, “helped me analyze where I’m at in life right now – career wise, interest wise, uncertainties – and figure out what my immediate next steps should be,” she recalled. “This alum introduced me to the idea that you don’t just go from graduating Grinnell to a really interesting dream job and helped me focus on the steps that I would need to take in order to strategically design my life.”
Benn Tannenbaum ’90, who both teaches a course on international relations and nuclear weapons at George Washington University and works for Sandia National Laboratories, really appreciates that the College is now offering programs like Virtual Meetups and MentorGrinnell because it helps students get a sense of all the avenues and opportunities that might be available to them.
“One of the challenges of being in academia is all you see are academics,” he says, “but when you talk to alumni you can see a much broader set of career paths and life experiences.”
As a physics major, and one who zeroed in on particle physics, Tannenbaum seemed destined to spend his life around particle accelerators, but opportunities like organizing fellow graduate students at Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory as well as events far beyond his control like the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider at Waxahachie, Texas, and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks led him to an American Physical Society-sponsored fellowship working in the halls of Congress.
Benn Tannenbaum ’90
In many ways, Tannenbaum’s journey is one with twists and turns that, at least on the surface, no one can prepare you for. But every 10-minute conversation that an alum contributes through the Meetup program can be valuable, particularly those peppered with the kinds of questions Rodriguez found herself asking alumni: “What made you who you are today? Did the classes you took at Grinnell prepare you for what you’re doing now? Is Grinnell going to set me up for the real world?”
Garcia says that the bridge that connects the student present with the alumni future “was smaller than it was before” after their Meetup experience. Life after Grinnell, Garcia realized is something “we’re all figuring out” and it can be just a littler easier doing it together.
—by Joe Engleman ’14