As a BFA Dance Senior and especially as a Sesquicentennial Scholar, Mia Williams realized the significance of stewarding strong alumni connections in the department, college and university. After reviewing mechanisms for alumni communications already in place, Williams began researching practices of other similar dance programs and noticed opportunities and need for growth, especially for the alumni webpage on the department website. Williams approached her adviser Susan Hadley with a proposition for building alumni relations as a senior project, which Hadley enthusiastically endorsed. Williams and Hadley arranged a meeting with Ohio State Dance External Relations Coordinator Damian Bowerman and the three of them devised a plan for supporting Williams’ goals of bolstering the department’s alumni relations and communications efforts.
Williams continued researching alumni pages of other dance programs. Upon noticing the common theme of updated alumni news on the pages she visited, the team decided that Williams would write an email to all dance and dance education alumni to be sent on her behalf by the college marketing and communications office explaining her project with a call to action for updating contact information and news. They also published the appeal on the department’s website and social media channels. Williams and Bowerman worked together to enhance the alumni news submission form on the website, including the ability to upload images with the updates. Over 65 alumni responded to the immediate campaign.
Williams used these responses and others collected in the past by the department to create a working Google document of alumni news sorted by decade for Bowerman to use to create a more robust alumni webpage, including a weekly feature, links to alumni groups, networking tools, the department’s digital archive project and events. “At the beginning of the year, I was unsure of the importance of this project,” says Williams. “Was this project ‘enough’ to be a capstone, a culmination of my years here at Ohio State? However, I reflected and realized every job, performance opportunity and position I have received thus far in my career was due to a connection I had created with someone. As I started my research and dove into the submissions of each alumni, I realized how close-knit our world is; a multitude of people mentioning their work crossing paths with another Ohio State graduate. I thought this project was not about choreography, but it is. I am choreographing connections. I am choreographing how people interact with intention, meaning and specificity. Similar to making a work, the people within the process then have the opportunity to make choices within the framework. They can choose to reach out to each other, choose their own way of interaction, start a new meaning for themselves and the people within the experience. A new world, our own world, of communication is then created. Furthermore, our number one asset is our people. We are not only each other’s way of continuing our own careers but the way of continuing the development and sustainability of our art form in the world.”
While this is will be an ongoing project, Williams realized that most of the responses to her call came from recent graduates. Going forward, she encourages the department to consider phone and in-person interviews with a broader range of alumni, perhaps including video documentation of the interviews to use as an asset for telling alumni stories for all generations.
In addition to the focus on the new webpage, Williams is encouraging current seniors to stay engaged with the department, the college, and the university by updating their contact information, using the networking power of Ohio State’s Alumnifire, joining the dance alumni Facebook group, and being active members of the university’s Alumni Association.
