The Last Word: How to Stay in Touch with Younger Generations
I attended Stanford University School of Medicine during the height of the Internet boom in the latter half of the 1990s. In the milieu of the dot com boom and subsequent crash, our class was perhaps unusual in the diversity of career paths of such a small group—ranging from an amateur animator to start-up entrepreneur to academic researchers and clinicians.
I had ended up in life sciences venture capital, a business field that ironically situated me physically (a few hundred yards from Palm Drive) and intellectually (reading papers at Lane Library) quite close to my professional roots at the medical school. Like many alums, I sought out the Class Notes section to keep abreast of my classmates who were accomplishing great things in such a variety of areas. So when the Class Notes section was discontinued in Stanford Medicine magazine, I felt the need to reach out on my own to find out what my collective class had been doing. This turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined.
First, the wonderful flexibility of Stanford University School of Medicine also makes it challenging to track us down. Although we enter together as one class in anatomy, we exit years apart after taking different paths to graduation. Second, the lack of "class agents" means that there is no central organizer who collects and encourages class note contributions—the stories and anecdotes that make the Class Notes engaging. Finally, the lack of any consistent forum to communicate means that even motivated alums have no way to share updates on their careers or personal lives.
Two years ago, I decided to take the initiative and compile our own class newsletter based on my entering class year of 1996. After tracking down as many e-mail addresses as possible, I sent out a request for updates and pleaded for those whom I had reached to forward the message to those whom I had missed. The response was surprising. Out of my 86 classmates, more than 20 replied and this content became the foundation for a mini-newsletter that our class has sent to each other for the past two years. Encouraged by the response and inspired by the belief that the Class Notes could and should be a central part of the alumni experience, our class shared this newsletter with the Bench & Bedside editors with the hope that our efforts might inspire other classes to do the same. In the era of social networking, the Class Notes can sometimes seem anachronistic. But, for most of us "technologically challenged" alums who were trained in an era before Facebook, the Class Notes represent the most convenient way for us to keep in touch with our classmates.
If you agree, I hope you will share your updates with the alumni office, volunteer to be your class agent to help collect/edit stories from your classmates, or just provide feedback on how the Class Notes can be made more effective. Because, in the end, what better story is there to read about in the alumni magazine than one about us?