"Thank you to every volunteer at the Alumni Leadership Conference. Your activities make MIT a better place."
- MIT Alumni Association President John W. Jarve ’78, SM ’79
The Alumni Association’s annual Alumni Leadership Conference took place on Sept. 27-28, 2013, and nearly 500 alumni from more than 40 class years returned to campus to reconnect with the Institute and discuss what they do for MIT.
ALC 2013 kicked off with TIMtalks (Think. Inspire. Motivate.), a series of presentations given by current MIT students based on the popular TED Talks model. Seven students shared their ideas, successes, and failures, and gave their unique perspective on what it means to be a present-day MIT Engineer.
Rodrigo Davies, a graduate student in the MIT Media Lab and Center for Civic Media, spoke about the ubiquity of a visual, digital world and stressed the importance of communication through conversation.
Rodrigo Davies
"For me, the challenge is to build tools using the technology that almost all of us have—our voices," Davies said. “Allowing people to communicate in their own language and dialect is beautiful and must be preserved."
MIT undergraduate Sheila Xu, who was born deaf and has a cochlear implant, presented her talk in equal parts speaking and sign language. She challenged MIT to better embrace deaf students and take advantage of the deaf community’s unique skillset.
"MIT challenges me every day, but in turn I challenge MIT to tackle issues with the deaf community," Xu says. “If you take advantage of the skills and knowledge of the deaf community, it will enrich all of MIT."
Last year’s ALC coincided with the inauguration of MT President L. Rafael Reif, and on day two of this year’s conference, President Reif returned to share his ideas for MIT’s future, which include continuing research on the world's most-pressing issues, expanding the capacity to innovate, and using digital learning to reinvent the college experience.
"We are on the frontier of digital learning," Reif says. "We are reinventing college education and participating in the most important development since the printing press."
The award-winning Sidney-Pacific 10th Anniversary Planning Committee
Throughout the weekend, alumni and volunteers viewed a video annual report and took part in more than 40 sessions, keynote addresses, networking meals and socials, and even a director’s cut movie screening of In the Family, a 2011 film written and produced by Patrick Wang ’98, who also stars.
In addition their in-person interactions, volunteers also took the ALC discussion online and posted comments and shared their ideas on Twitter using the hashtag #mitalc. A custom MIT ALC Twitter feed was on display throughout the conference and featured more than 330 tweets, 133 retweets, and nearly 40 photos from 100 different Twitter handles.
Per ALC tradition, the conference closed with the Leadership Awards Celebration, where the Association and more than 300 guests honored 24 individuals and five groups. Cordelia M. Price ’78, SM ’82 and G. Mead Wyman ’62 were honored with the Bronze Beaver Award, the highest honor that the Alumni Association bestows up on its volunteers.
