How the MIT Alumni Forum Will Make You Feel Like You’re Back Doing Psets

As MIT students, you came together and learned, contemplated, and problem-solved, uniting your minds, hands, and hearts for a common goal: to make a better world. Whether because of graduating and moving from campus, getting engrossed in a busy personal and professional life, or the recent pandemic, recreating the joy and challenge of drinking from the firehose might feel harder than ever before.

Enter the MIT Alumni Forum, a new series that offers the opportunity to come together as an alumni community through engaging and focused online gatherings.

“A fusion of TED Talk meets conference, the monthly events will explore global challenges—such as climate, service to humankind, and more—through an MIT-specific lens,” says Victoria Gonin, the Alumni Association’s executive director of alumni relations. “Each forum is built around one primary event on a topic, featuring a panel of alumni experts and followed by breakout discussions that allow alumni the opportunity to discuss, debrief, and take the conversation further.”

Additional partner events―in which clubs, groups, and MIT schools/departments host supporting gatherings related to the topic―take place during the same week.

For the first MIT Alumni Forum event on innovation and entrepreneurship in November, one of the partner events was a Nuts and Bolts of Creating a Winning Pitch Deck workshop. (To view a recording of the event, Infinite Connection login is required.)

“The event was designed for undergraduate- and graduate-degree alumni of the last decade and walked them through how to distill complex ideas into a successful slide presentation for investor consideration,” says Ellen Stahl, director of alumni career programming in the Association. “Having alumni returning to a learning space together—that could mimic their days at the Institute—to gain a ‘how to’ knowledge they can take back to their professional lives and directly impact their career trajectory is extremely exciting.”

This month’s event on January 19, MIT Alumni Forum: In Service to Humankind, will feature alumni in health care, science research, STEM education, and government service. The roster of panelists includes Kevin Churchwell ’83, MD (moderator), president and CEO of Boston Children’s Hospital; Teresa Fazio ’02, US Marine Corps veteran and author; David Wise ’14, founder of the Tahoe Summer STEM Camps; and Melissa Wu ’05, CEO of Seeding Labs.

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