Young alumni advise this year’s senior class

The Hopkins Alumni Association hosted its ninth annual Seniors & Young Alumni Leadership Symposium at Camden Yards on Saturday. More than 40 young alumni gathered to share their post-graduation experiences with a group of about 90 seniors before they enter the workforce.

The event featured keynote speaker Lucie Fink, who graduated in 2014 and currently works as a video producer for Refinery29, a digital media and entertainment company. Fink emphasized the importance of students making their own path as they pursue their post-graduate careers. 

“My encouragement for people is to get out there and put into effect what I just shared with you, all the multiple times in my journey where I just decided to try something new,” Fink said. “It was not always easy... but it led to some incredible changes.”

Fink initially planned to major in Neuroscience, but after her first few semesters she decided that she didn’t want to follow the pre-med track. Instead, despite having little experience with media, she felt drawn to the entertainment industry. 

In order to pursue this goal, Fink reached out to the University admissions office as a freshman and proposed a video series promoting the University and Baltimore.

In addition to the two keynote speeches from alumni, there were numerous opportunities for one-on-one discussions with alumni. In small groups, alumni presented panels about aspects of life after Hopkins, including insight on careers and general life advice.

Senior Anthony Garay, director of alumni events for Alumni Student Ambassadors (ASA), attended Saturday’s event and said the organization succeeded in pairing current students with young alumni who had similar career interests. He stated that because the young alumni were all within 10 years of graduating, they offered important insight on how life would change after graduation.

“Going into senior year it’s always a good idea to make connections with young alumni and get a feel for what’s going to happen after Hopkins,“ he said. “They had a bunch of workshops on everything from budgeting in the real world to navigating a job outside of your major.” 

In one of these breakout sessions, alumni Scott Heyman, an MBA candidate at The Wharton School; Merrill Anovick, a marketing and strategy lead at Google; and Max Wieder, a systems engineer at the Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, discussed the fundamental principles of managing personal finances. 

The discussion focused on the best ways to invest, the importance of keeping an emergency fund and the differences between various types of retirement funds. 

A recurring topic at the symposium was mentorship. In this vein, alumni Paul Markakis, Jenn Roche, Cathy Lerro and Affan Sheikh held another breakout session titled “Finding Mentorship at Work.”

Sheikh, an MBA candidate at the Georgetown University School of Business, spoke about the benefits of having a mentor. 

“Everybody brings something different to the table, lots of different perspectives on things — it’s all about balance — having professional mentors, personal mentors,” Sheikh said. “My boss may be able to help me elevate my career, but she’s not the person who will go out with me on weekends in order to introduce me to some of the people outside of our career field who I want to meet.”

Markakis further stated that networking is more than just collecting business cards. 

“I’ve lost opportunities because I saw it as just ‘I’m going to collect business cards, and I’m going to connect on LinkedIn and I’m building my network,’ but they’re very thin connections,” he said. 

Likewise, Garay thought that the event was a good way for the graduating class to make connections with recent graduates, especially because the young alumni were so eager to help the seniors with their future careers.

“I wish more people would have gone because I think a lot of time you think, ‘oh I should go and meet young alumni,’ but we’re basically young alumni, so this is our new community,“ Garay said. “All of the people I met there were incredibly willing to help.”