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August 31, 2009
Active summer sets stage for fall events

Eric Rangus is the director of communications for the Emory Alumni Association.

Actually, that’s a bit whiny, isn’t it? By all accounts, the summer of 2009 has been a great one at the Emory Alumni Association (EAA) and across the Emory alumni community. The EAA has been busy since Commencement and while it sometimes feels there still aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish all we want, we have a lot to celebrate. And we certainly have nothing to complain about.

We’re very proud of our social media platforms. For instance, EAA recently welcomed its 1,200th fan to our Facebook page. With the great help of our summer communications intern Erin Crews ’09C–’09G, we now update our blog, EAAvesdropping, every weekday. One of our most popular EAAvesdropping features is “Photo of the Day,” which runs a couple times a week. The feature gives us a chance to dig deeply into our (and the University’s) photo archive for some neat images of campus and of our alumni.

Recently, we’ve focused on current shots from campus, but we’ve received some submissions from alumni outside Atlanta and we have years and years of Emory history to page through. We already have some fun images from the past we’re waiting to display. Should bring back some wonderful memories for all our alumni (as well as faculty and staff, particularly if you’ve been on campus a while).

Events-wise, we’ve had an exciting summer. We closed out our Faculty Destinations speaker series in Boston with public health professor Justin Remais. The EAA’s regional chapters hosted dozens of events from coast to coast, including a dessert tasting in Los Angeles that doubled as a benefit for an alumnae-founded nonprofit, a scavenger hunt in New York, happy hours from Connecticut to Washington state and much, much more.

On occasion, we even ventured outside the United States. In August the EAA hosted more than a dozen Let’s Go Emory! parties to welcome incoming students to Emory. One of them took place in Mumbai, India, proving that the Emory community is truly a worldwide community.

But of course, we stay close to home, too. More than 2,700 alumni double as Emory faculty or staff, and the EAA reaches out to them (you) through 4EU (Emory Educated, Emory Employed Unlimited). And in July, 4EU hosted one of its most successful events yet — a guided tour of the Woodruff Library’s Alice Walker exhibit, which included a presentation from gallery director Elizabeth Russey (that’s archived on EAAvesdropping, as well).

And now that we’ve welcomed the next generation of Emory alumni at orientation weekend, we’re looking ahead to the end of September for the Emory Homecoming Weekend, when we herald the return of thousands of alumni to campus for reunions, our parade and tailgate and a lot more.