Now Up With Alumni
Betsy Myers MPA 2000
Betsy Myers MPA 2000, the new director of Alumni
Programs at the Kennedy School, is trying to chart a fresh course
as she reconnects alumni who have lost contact with the school. She’s
been traveling around the country, meeting with alumni, and finding out
how the Kennedy School can help them as they progress in their careers.
Myers is no stranger to taking to the road. She toured around the country
for a year with Up With People,
a nonprofit organization that offers young people a chance to travel,
perform on-stage, and work on community service projects.
And
more recently, Myers joined her sister Dee Dee Myers, former press secretary
to President Clinton, at the White House. There she had the ear of the
administration as deputy assistant to the president and director of women’s
initiatives, where she advised Clinton and other officials on women’s
issues. One of her pet projects was “At the Table,” which took
women from the Clinton administration out on the road to gather with small
groups of women to chat about health care, child care, and pay equity
concerns. Previous to joining the Clinton administration, Myers worked
on the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Distance Learning Initiative
and managed its technical assistance programs. Before her arrival at the
SBA, she owned her own company, where she provided financial services
to women business owners and families.
Myers, who
was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in Valencia, California,
draws on these experiences as she considers the issues facing Kennedy
School alumni.
They move
around a lot. “They’ll go serve a president for two years and
then go back to a foundation or other career. There’s a lot more
movement in careers than 20 years ago — and that’s definitely
the case for alumni working in the public sector,” says Myers. She’d
like to build up a network of alumni who can help their classmates if
they’re looking for a job in Washington, DC, or just someone to have
dinner with if they’re traveling to Singapore.
“We’re
looking for alumni to help in career services and to help students as
they transition into their careers. Since nobody other than an alum knows
what kind of student is perfect for the Kennedy School, we’d also
like to enlist alumni to recruit for students more aggressively,”
says Myers. “We’re looking for alumni who have been out there
in the world — who have all kinds of expertise — to be more
involved in our research centers and more involved with what’s going
on here at the Kennedy School.” In addition, Myers would like to
encourage alumni to get involved in the regional councils. So far, there
are chapters in New York, Washington, DC, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco,
Argentina, and Japan.
Myers’s
main focus right now is to take a step back and find out what Kennedy
School alums really want and determine what resources would be most useful
to them as they progress in their careers. First and foremost, she hopes
to impress upon alumni that graduation is really just the beginning of
their relationship to the Kennedy School.
“Just because they’ve gotten their master’s doesn’t mean that their learning is over. It’s only just begun. There is so much going on at the Kennedy School that can have a real impact on their careers,” says Myers.
