Paul Szmal: Time for our Scholastically Speaking segment, where we focus on our friends from Finger Lakes Community College. Friend of the show, pun not intended, Lenore Friend is here. Good morning, Lenore. How are you?
Lenore Friend: Good morning, Ted. I'm good.
Paul Szmal: Good. Very good. Very good. We're going to kind of theme today's conversation around alumni, because there are some things that maybe even alumni of LFLCC are not aware of in terms of benefits, opportunities, things of that nature. Lenore, how many alumni are in the area?
Lenore Friend: Well, Ted, we have probably over 31,000 alumni now, if you add them up over the last 50 some years that we've been churning out graduates. I was here last month with one of our alum from the Sands Family YMCA talking about internships. I'm here today with Ellie Calder. She's our Development Director, and she works more closely with alumni, and she can probably talk in a lot greater detail about our alumni programming.
Paul Szmal: Sure. Ellie, good morning. How are you?
Ellie Calder: I'm doing well. How are you?
Paul Szmal: Good. Good. Let's start off with the definition of what an alumnus actually is.
Ellie Calder: So anyone who is an alumnus is an individual who completes a degree and or certificate with 30 more credits. We know that students often attend other colleges or they'll transfer to a four-year school, so they're gaining and building credits in confidence before doing so. So we're proud to give folks a solid foundation in order to consider them part of the Laker community, but that's exactly what it means to be a Laker.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, and shall we say to paraphrase a popular commercial phrase, alumni have its privileges. So let's talk about some of the benefits of being an alumni from FLCC.
Ellie Calder: Alumni donors can audit some FLCC classes free of charge. That has been around for a very long time. They also have access to career coaching, resume assistance. Both of those take place in FLCC career services. They also have access to our FLCC fitness center, but the newest and most exciting that I want to share is access to eCornell professional certificate programs. So our FLCC alumni actually get access to these certificate programs at a reduced cost. The regular cost itself is $1,199 per course. However, alumni pay $450, so they have their own dedicated portal to revere those course options, which includes engineering, data science and analysis, AI, project management. We have some law, real estate, technology, and if anyone is interested in looking into that, they can go to eCornell.cornell.edu forward slash portal forward slash FLCC.
Paul Szmal: So if the regular price is $1,199 and the price for an alumni is $450, that's almost like a two-thirds reduction in the price.
Ellie Calder: It's a very big reduction, yes.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, yeah, definitely worth it if you're looking for certification in any of the disciplines that Ellie was talking about. We're visiting with our friends from Finger Lakes Community College here on FLX morning, talking about some of the benefits and opportunities that alumni from FLCC have, some of which you may not know about. Let's talk about some of the opportunities. There are a couple of, well, let's see, there is an event coming up on July the 26th that has a baseball thing.
Ellie Calder: Absolutely, yep, coming up on July 26th at 6 30 p.m. we have alumni day at the Geneva Red Wings that'll take place at McDonnell Park in Geneva, New York. Our alumni get an entrance fee of three dollars discounted by us and, you know, they can come with their friends and family. There is still time to register for that game. Anyone who's interested can find that link at flcc.edu forward slash events. We did recently have another alumni event. We host this every year, so that was on July 15th. We host the alumni wine tasting. It's a lot of good conversation. Everyone gets to try the new wines and anyone who is not a wine drinker, there's always beverages available for everyone. It was a really great time.
Paul Szmal: Here's the neat thing about the Geneva Red Wings at McDonnell Park. It's a throwback to old school baseball. It's an old-style ballpark, has its own unique charm, but the players are young players from what's called the Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League, so you're seeing players that may someday wind up in the minor league system working their way up to the big show in the major leagues, so it's pretty cool.
Ellie Calder: Absolutely. The membership of current students through the sponsorship of interns is also part of what goes on for alumni opportunities, and I know we touched on this a little bit last month with our friends from the Sands Family YMCA, but if you missed that, what kind of internship opportunities are we talking about here?
Lenore Friend: Well, I'll jump in on that one. It can really be any sort of internship opportunity, so if we're talking from the alumni, let's say you're an alumni manager, you're a business owner, and you are looking for an intern. We probably have a program at FLCC where we have some students who could be of some service. We have students who are doing marketing and business type programming, and so they might be able to help with marketing and business programming. We also have obviously students in our horticulture program, and so if you're in any sort of outdoor business, agriculture, something like that. So we really just encourage people to contact us, and people can just go to our website and type in internships, and you will find the right page, the right contacts. So it's a really great opportunity if you are an alumnus and you want to get some assistance and give back to the next generation of students.
Paul Szmal: And Ellie, you can also participate on advisory boards that are themed around certain courses or disciplines, as well as the FLCC Foundation Board.
Ellie Calder: Absolutely. In addition to that, we do have some opportunities for volunteering coming up, so anyone who has not yet submitted or it has been a while, feel free to submit an alumni survey. We are soon going to be tapping into our volunteer population for some upcoming exciting things. And there's also the twice yearly Laker Magazine that shares alumni stories, but in order to share those stories, it's important for alumni to reach out.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, absolutely. The back end of the magazine always has class notes, and I just love that aspect of it, because it's just a couple sentences. We really do want to hear from people and find out what they're doing. And some of our alumni are doing some really interesting things related to technology, historic preservation. They're working all across the globe, and sometimes they're writing books, and it's just really fun to see what they're doing. And often that is a source for us to do further interviews and articles for the Laker Magazine. So we really encourage people to go to flcc.edu forward slash alumni, and on that web page you will find back issues of the Laker. You'll find the link to submit a class note. We try to make it easy for you by just creating a form you can fill out. You can also just email alumni at flcc.edu and Ellie answers that email, so she will be checking that every day to see what sort of news and information is coming in. And just to give you a couple of examples here, because I absolutely love the name of one of these. The spring issue highlighted Michael Tucker's photography business. He's a class of 2017 alumni. It's a drone photography business called Drone of Arc. Love the name of that.
Ellie Calder: Very clever.
Paul Szmal: Yes, and also Kate Reuter, class of 1992, was profiled with her gold leaf spa that she is running. So just a couple of the examples there of alumni at work out in the world, and a way to find out more about what those alumni are doing, and maybe even share your own stories. Lenore gave you the contact information there. So Lenore and Ellie, we appreciate everything. As always, good to talk about all things FLCC, and I hope if you're an alumni that you take advantage of some of these benefits and opportunities that are available to you. Ladies, thank you for joining us this morning.
Lenore Friend: Thanks so much, Ted.
Ellie Calder: Thank you.
