Judith M. Cole joined Carnegie Mellon this past January as its new associate vice president for alumni relations. Carnegie Mellon Today recently caught up with Cole to find out a little bit about her and her vision for alumni relations at Carnegie Mellon.
What career path brought you to Carnegie Mellon?
For the past 17 years, I have been working for the alumni association at Yale University in a variety of different positions. At one time or another, I have had direct responsibility for all areas of alumni relations at Yale, including serving as the acting executive director for a while. I am a graduate of the University of Colorado, with an MBA from Yale’s School of Management. Prior to enrolling in graduate school, I was an oil and gas banker in Houston, Texas, for six years, and following graduate school, but before returning to work at Yale, I was a strategy consultant for the Boston Consulting Group for one year.
Tell us something people might be surprised to know about you.
Many people have been surprised to learn that I love to fly fish. My son and I go to the north woods of Maine every summer to go fishing. We have had the same Maine guide for 14 years and we love being in the woods—the more remote the better. It restores my soul.
What attracted you to Carnegie Mellon?
This is an amazing place! It is brilliant and creative and a little quirky, yet totally compelling to anyone who loves and cares about higher education. It is a hotbed of new ideas, and I find that very exciting.
What is your approach to alumni relations?
As a society we should all care about the success of our great educational institutions, and we should all support them in whatever way we are able. Support does not always have to mean contributing money, although that is one possible way. Support also can mean volunteering time and expertise, raising awareness of Carnegie Mellon in the world, recruiting students to attend Carnegie Mellon or hiring them to work in your company following graduation, or leveraging networks and relationships in support of the university. The possibilities are limited only by our imaginations.
What does this mean for alumni and their relationship with the university?
The relationship between a university and its alumni must be about finding the common ground between alumni interests and university priorities, then developing programming that covers (and perhaps expands) that common ground. Much work has been done already, but just as Carnegie Mellon is an institution that is continuously reinventing itself, so must our alumni relations programs continue to evolve to meet the needs of the future.
Cole judycole@andrew.cmu.edu would love to hear from you.
