Maria Britos/Staff Writer
Every semester thousands of undergraduate university students leave college life, become alumni and enter the “real world” – what Duane Wiles, associate vice president of Alumni Relations and the executive director of the Alumni Association, calls the “bread and butter of the institution.”
With the University’s most recent and largest donation – a whopping $400,000 to the University College of Law by alumnus Abraham Ovadia – Wiles said alumni help to financially support the University.
“[The donation] doesn’t have to be large. It could be anything from five dollars to 10 dollars to 20 dollars; whatever amount they can give, that money helps,” said Wiles.
FIU Foundation, Inc.’s fundraising goal to raise $750 million in ten years will reach out to alumni in its third phase of the campaign.
According to Wiles, alumni are not only expected to give monetary donations, the association highly encourages participation within university related events. Such programs consist of volunteering to serve as mentors to university students and to other alumni through the new alumni to alumni mentoring program managed by the Career Services.
Alumni can also volunteer by serving on the close to 30 alumni chapters nationally and internationally. These chapters, active in cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, consist of groups of former students who organize events to help support the University and celebrate the Panther pride.
Other ways that alumni give back to the University is by providing student scholarships. Just recently, Pamela Silva Conde, former student and alumna of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, established the Pamela Silva Conde Scholarship for first-generation students in the journalism program. The Univision co-anchor was recently named alumni of the year and is one of the many lifetime members of the Alumni Association.
“They have so much to offer as far as their expertise and certainly can be a resource for our current students,” said Wiles.
But alumni not only serve as a support system, part of the reason their involvement is so important is because they can help as recruitment tools for the next generation of incoming students, said Wiles,
“We need the alumni to go out there and tell the FIU story,” said Wiles.
Spreading the message to the world via graduates can help increase and build affinity for the institution. It’s the school spirit and pride for the alma mater that reconnects alumni back to the University as well as helping to promote and making the institution’s name recognizable to the world.
As part of another alumni project, the Alumni Association is also hosting the first Panther Alumni Week during February 2014 where alumni are invited back on-campus to visit and talk to current students. The project is still in its planning process.
“The more engaged our alumni are, the stronger our University becomes and that only helps to increase the value of your degree,” said Wiles.
Last year’s gifts included $2 million for the Alumni Center, $1 million for the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine and $900,000 in support of the Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management.
“These are but a few of the many examples of the outstanding generosity of our FIU family,” wrote University Advancement’s Campaign Communications Director Andra Liwag in an email.
Howard Lipman, president and chief executive officer of FIU Foundation, Inc., was unavailable for comment by press time.
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