Dear classmates,
I hope you enjoyed (or survived, for those of us in northern regions) your winter, as spring threatens to make an appearance.
Many exciting things are happening at our College. Recent College articles, mailings, and websites have been emphasizing Mount Holyoke’s initiatives that help students include career goals into their liberal arts studies. Among these is the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives, which provides cross-disciplinary classes, focusing on comparative aspects. The College also offers a Global Scholar in Residence program, global challenges conferences, and study abroad. In addition, Mount Holyoke has created The Lynk to connect students’ academic studies with practical applications of liberal arts and science. The Career Development Center encourages each student to shape her own experience, and offers universal funding for summer internships. These various offerings have made the College more “outward facing,” a once-popular corporate term.
Our class should not forget the early “outward-facing” initiatives that we were instrumental in molding. The Five College and Twelve-College exchanges were relatively new in 1969, and expanded considerably during our tenure. We also helped develop and institute the “January term,” which allowed students to explore career-related internships. We have also come a long way in our communications with our classmates. As described below, our website has be changing to keep up with new technologies. In fact, I believe this is another first for our class—a class newsletter provided exclusively electronically!
Our class website is also introducing new “outward facing” changes. It has been upgraded to include a PayPal button. Now you can easily pay your dues ($25 for the five years from 2013–18). Percentage of class members who pay dues is an important metric the College uses when analyzing our Class. I urge those of you who haven’t paid their dues yet to take advantage of this easy way to help our class.
Attention Facebook users: we have a closed group for the class of 1973. Right now the url is https://www.facebook.com/MHC73?ref=aymt_homepage_panel, which is very funky. As soon as there are more than 25 “likes” on the page, we can change it to www.facebook.com/MHC73. So, please like our page. For those of you on LinkedIn, our group is Mount Holyoke College Class of 1973. If you are already on LinkedIn, go to the “Interests” tab and select “Groups”. At the bottom right, you will see a button for “Find Groups”. Click this and type in our group name. From there, you can join it. (In the full interests of disclosure, our webmaster provided this paragraph to me—your President is nowhere this technologically skilled?)
As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, we are focusing upon engaging all of our class members. Let your classmates know what you’re up to through our class scribe, Nancy Friedman Ross. Career changes, retirement, family, education, travel, hobbies, health, romance…Inquiring minds want to know! Email Nancy anytime.
We are going to plan a mini-reunion for next year, as many of us will be turning 65 (how did that happen?)… We will be sending out a survey asking about preferences for time and location. Please respond when you see it in your inbox. I attended a similar reunion celebrating our 60th birthdays. We all had such a great time—I hope that many of you will join us for this mini-reunion.
We are doing a great job in raising our class gift this year. Our goals are $135,000 and 40% participation. Thus far we have raised $130,595 in gifts and pledges (only $4,405 more to go!) and 31% participation (only 41 more class donors needed). I can’t emphasize too much that the College puts great weight on percentage of class participation. No matter what the size of the donation is, it counts as participation. I know we can meet our goals. Thank you to everyone in the Class.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns that you would like to share with me, please email me or call me at 914-941-5050.
Wishing you a warm and happy spring,
Susan M. Doherty
Susan Mikes Doherty
President, MHC Class of 1973