Armed with the knowledge that more than half of its alumni have graduated in the last dozen years, the Penn State College of Communications has created a Young Alumni Council to enhance its connection with those recent graduates and allow them to engage with students to share early career advice.
“We wanted to establish a group in support of the college’s larger Alumni Society Board focused on engaging our more recent graduates,” said Kevin Flintosh, who earned his journalism degree in 2006 and serves as the council’s managing director. “This group of outstanding young alumni will serve as a link between the college, the Alumni Society Board and our more recent alumni to stress that your relationship with Penn State can be lifelong.”
The council is made up of five alumni age 28 and younger representing each of the college’s five majors: advertising/public relations, film-video, journalism, media studies and telecommunications. The group is tasked with representing the voice of the ever-growing young alumni constituency of the college, targeting and engaging alumni who have graduated over the past decade by planning events and programs, while also communicating with peers and raising awareness.
The College of Communications joins the College of Engineering as the first academic units at Penn State to create councils for young alumni.
Communications council members will serve three-year terms. They are expected to attend one Alumni Society Board meeting and oversee a major initiative each year.
Inaugural members of the Young Alumni Council are:
-- Marielena Balouris, 2015 journalism and political science graduate, is a multimedia journalist and reporter for WAVY-TV in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Previously, she worked at WTAJ-TV in Altoona.
-- Patrick Bunting, 2013 telecommunications graduate, is a manager of corporate communications for NBCUniversal, acting as a strategic communications adviser to leadership in the advertising sales and client partnerships division on all initiatives, press requests and public appearances. He previously worked as a junior publicist with NBC News and was part of NBCUniversal’s post-graduate Page Program.
-- Amy Camacho, 2013 graduate in film-video, works as a freelance television producer. She spent a year-and-a-half working on a variety of shows for Lion Television in New York City. Her credits include: “Deadly Devotion” for Investigation Discovery, “Mean Girls” for MTV, “World’s Deadliest” for Nate Geo Wild, “Junk Food Flip” for The Cooking Channel, “How Dogs Got Their Shapes” for Nat Geo Wild’s Bark Fest, and “Six Degrees of Murder” for Investigation Discovery.
-- Jianghanhan Li: 2014 media studies graduate, she is currently pursuing master’s degrees in journalism and quantitative methods in the social sciences at Columbia University. After graduation, Li worked for a year at the China American Innovation Network, a non-profit organization in San Francisco that aims to bridge China and the United States in technology entrepreneurship.
-- Jessica Quinlan, 2010 public relations graduate, resides in Jersey City, New Jersey, and serves as the director of marketing for Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment. In her position, she drives the venue marketing initiatives for both current and future venues, which include: Barclays Center, Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Ford Amphitheater at Coney Island Boardwalk, and More. Since graduating, Quinlan has worked at a variety of companies in the events and marketing industries, including the Madison Square Garden Company.