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Phi
Kappa NUSLETTER |
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Fall 2009 |
Volume 5, Issue 1 |
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Words
of Wisdom “In the words of Red Green- If the women don't find ya handsome at least they'll find ya handy." Nic Berry (Fish, Fall 2005) Annual Goals: · Raise funds for the Divid Weddle Memorial Scholarship. · Recruit new, dedicated members to preserve the Newts ·
Work
to develop better
Alumni-Active relationship and communication David Weddle Scholarship This annual scholarship is awarded to a male or female first-year student who best demonstrates the strongest combination of excellence and diversity based upon Phi Kappa Nu’s five-fold purpose. Our hope is to
increase the scholarship amount from $500 to $1000 dollars in the
coming years in the hopes of increasing the impact our contribution has
on students in the Cornell Community.
810 Commons Circle Box #2116 Mount Vernon, IA 52314 newts@cornellcollege.edu We’re on the Web! www.cornellcollege.edu/ |
Alumni Director’s Report As our newly elected director of Alumni Relations, I would like to introduce myself to the alumni community and express how excited I am to have this opportunity to serve you all and build a closer community between the actives and alumni of Phi Kappa Nu. Inside this newsletter you will find updates on Newt activities, communication from your fellow alumni and actives, and information on upcoming events for Homecoming 2009. I hope that you enjoy this newsletter and find it informative and helpful. I look forward to serving you all as Alumni director. Have a great summer! Ron
Logan, Meet our New Triumvirate My name is Yuri Mitchell and I am one of the elected Triumvirs for the 2009-2010 school year. I am originally from St. Petersburg, Russia, but have lived in Lawrence, KS for half of my life. I will be a senior this coming year, majoring in Politics and Business and Economics. Even though seeing our brothers in the 2009 graduating class go was a bittersweet moment, we are looking forward to the coming year. I, along with my fellow Triumvirs, hope to bring to the leadership of the group new ideas while still keeping old traditions alive. Currently, the group has a fairly small active membership; nevertheless, we have an ambitious agenda for this year, consisting of many widespread campus events, a large volunteering aspect, and leadership within our respective graduating classes. I hope you can help us with our efforts. Yuri Mitchell My name is Chuck Hay. I pledged fall '07 and I'm currently the king Chicken. I'm doing a BSS in Math and Biochemistry/Molecular Biology with minors in math, chemistry and biology. This year my goals for the group are to find ways to increase the size of the group and to try and get the group to become more laid back and less rigid. Chuck Hay As one of the new "Tri-guys" I am happy to introduce myself. My name is Ben Blaser and I became a Newt in the Fall of 2008. Before I pledged, as far back as Freshman year, I was interested in the Newts. I had the opportunity to meet some of you and really enjoyed the experiences, they are some of my first memories of the Newts and among the many reasons that I wanted to join. Since last Fall, being a member of the News has been a very positive and life changing experience, as I am sure that you all remember. In addition to having a position as a Triumvir, I have also taken up several other positions, including Athletic Chair, Social Chair, and Greek Council Representative. I am very honored to be able to hold these positions in the group. Through them I feel that I am able to truly represent the values of the group and lead it in the directions of our Five-Fold purpose. One such goal that I am proud to be working on now is maintaining our status as respectful gentlemen on campus and gaining recognition for our group. I believe that this will result in a gain in numbers as well as a position on campus that we, as actives and alums, can be proud of. I really look forward to getting together with you again and meeting more of you in the upcoming months as well as throughout the years. Ben Blaser Amendments You may have noticed that our constitution has had a recent update. Parts C and D were added this past school year to Section V (Finance). As fundraising chair last year, I felt that the old policy of "volunteer" fundraising was unfair, inefficient and outdated. Thinking that it would be a nice idea to reward those that wanted to help the group through fundraising and to provide incentives for the rest, we passed the aforementioned amendment to the Phi Kappa Nu Constitution. Looking at how we traditionally raised funds with Hawkeye football games, the new change allows those that fund raise to keep part of the money they make to help offset dues, formal payments, and other expenses as needed. I am proud to say that, just counting the funds that went into the the Phi Kappa Nu bank account, 13 full time members, by working football, basketball, and wrestling Iowa sporting events, raised over $1200 through the course of the school year. This extra money helped us pay for the annual donation to Relay for Life as well as offset the costs of 2009 formal. We hope to continue this success in the coming school year and beyond. Yuri Mitchell Homecoming 2009 Homecoming is approaching quickly, and the final plans are being made to make sure that this homecoming goes smoothly and with plenty of fun. The homecoming schedule is now up on the site for viewing, just click on the Homecoming link on the Phi Kappa Nu homepage. This year, several alumni worked to start homecoming festivities early and reserved Matsells for Thursday night before homecoming (Oct. 8th) in the hope to have an Alumni only event to start off the weekend. If you would like more information on this, or you would like to help out or attend, please get in touch with Phill Seebeck via email at PhillandKirsten@comcast.net. Also, we have reserved two rooms at the Marriott for group use on Saturday, the 10th. Checkout is at 4 PM, and we are looking forward to our hotel party that night. We plan on keeping the reservation for only one room, so if there are any alumni looking for a place to stay, please contact our Director of Alumni Relations, Ron Logan, at rlogan11@cornellcollege.edu as soon as possible. Keep checking the Homecoming Page on the Newt website, as updates and more information will be posted as it is confirmed. **You must RSVP for the Matsells Alumni night. To RSVP for the Matsells Alumni campout on Thursday (Oct. 8th) contact Phill Seebeck at PhillandKirsten@comcast.net.** Newt Alumni Association The Brotherhood began to look in to the possibility of a Newt Alumni Association several years back, and the desire to create a unified alumni association has resurfaced. We are interested in putting together a small group of Alumni that are able to meet once a year to help actives organize homecoming and provide insight that will help us keep better communication with our distinguished past. This association will not be a simple networking system to benefit the actives- our hope is to build a good relationship and mentoring program that can help us as current members grow and learn from alumni and their experiences in the real world, while providing an organization that alumni can use as both experience and as a career/resume builder. If anyone is interested in helping put a project like this together, please contact our Director of Alumni Relations, Ron Logan at rlogan11@cornellcollege.edu. Alumni,
Mentorship, and Giving Alumni, Mentorship and Giving Leading up to and speaking to the Actives in May as the speaker for the final Colloquium of the 2008-2009 school year, I had the chance to think at length on the opportunities the Alumni have to support each other and the Actives. Several things came to mind and some of these ideas were brought up during my talk, while others I’ve saved for this article. While many of us choose to continue maintaining our adherence to the five folds upon graduation, there are also those of us who do not. While I have not had conversations at length with Alums who do not, I would not be surprised at all to discover a primary reason for that being lack of active group support and I found myself wondering why there isn’t a more formal system for Alumni to support each other in the continued pursuit of excellence in keeping each other accountable to the same standards we held each other as Actives. What if, I wondered, we established a more formal Alumni association, with a yearly meeting around homecoming and local/regional get-togethers as those Alumni who are local and regional to each other desire? While I’m aware that there are small groups of Alums who do this actively on their own and that there is a loose organization to it, especially revolving around Homecoming, I’ve never been made aware of a larger, more organized Alumni association outside of groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. Now, I do not know if there is a greater interest to organize more formally as an Alumni Association, or if the overriding sentiment is simply to remain as things are. I’m certainly not demanding anything – if there is no desire among the larger Phi Kappa Nu Alumni community not to organize, trying to force it would be futile and, even if achieved in some way, would be greatly ineffective without majority support. The opportunities, however, are great and many. Now, keep in mind, I’m not some sort of visionary genius and I’m certainly not trying to position myself as such; most of these ideas grew directly from my reading of Never Eat Alone and Who’s Got Your Back by Keith Ferrazzi, both of which I strongly suggest everyone read. One of the topics I touched on in my talk to the Actives was mentorship – of the young men in that room, at least three quarters of them identified themselves as an active mentor, mentee or both. In some cases, someone identified as a mentor was surprised to discover he’d had an impact on someone else in the room in that way. I make myself available to any Active members and recent Alumni who are interested, but I don’t know how many other Alums do this for other, younger Alums or Actives. I will say that many of the Actives seemed very receptive to the idea of active mentorship opportunities between Actives and Alumni. The idea I presented was to connect Actives with Alumni who are pursuing a particular career path or who are using their major in their professional life (or both). For example, presume there is an Active who is majoring in business and he is interested in pursuing a career in marketing – sure, it’s easy enough for him to look for marketing jobs and just go after it on his own. If there is an Alumnus, however, who has made a successful career for himself in the marketing world, what disadvantage is there to either of them for the Alum to mentor the Active in pursuing a career in marketing? What mistakes did the Alum make that he can help the Active in avoiding, or what advice can the Alum give to the Active to help him move forward more quickly in his career than other recent marketing grads who don’t have the advantage of active mentorship? Finally, on to the idea of giving. One of the things that has bothered me is seeing, on the Phi Kappa Nu website, a list of alumni who have sent money to the group. This list is usually five to ten names in length and, unless things have changed, these monetary gifts range from $100 to $150. I am guilty of not giving to the group every year, mainly because I haven’t always had that amount of money available to give. I started thinking about this and wondered: what if there was a push for Alums to each give between $20 and $50 a year? There are currently over 400 Alums – many don’t give for the same reason I haven’t – we don’t all have $100 or more to give. $100 or more is the amount of Alumni gifts that always came in, and I think many of us feel that if we can’t give at least that much, it’s not okay to give at all. But what if half of our 400-plus Alumni gave $20? This results in at least $4000 for the Actives to use outside of fundraising and dues, instead of the usual $1500 or less the group receives from Alumni giving. What if we gave $50 each, and 75% of us gave? That could be $15000 for the group to use. I know I personally would prefer that my funds not go toward alcohol purchases. As such, when I send in my $50 check this year, it will accompany a letter stating that this money is to go toward the scholarship. There’s no reason the rest of us can’t do the same, if we choose. Any of us could also choose to send a check in specifically stating the funds are to be used toward the purchase of a keg. Send money in for whatever purpose you’d prefer and just know that any funds without a specified purpose are for use at the Actives’ discretion. The ultimate point of the discussion on giving is this: I believe that the scholarship should be Alumni-funded and I would like to see the amount of the annual scholarship rise to at least $5000. In short, I engage the activities I’ve laid out in this article. I’m not going be the kind of hypocrite who calls others to action and then sits back and does nothing. The Actives I’ve discussed it with have agreed with me that they would like more Alumni to be directly involved in all or some of these ways. I believe that with more Alumni doing these things, we could make a major impact on both the lives of the Actives and in each other’s lives as Alumni. A Phi Kappa Nu Alumni Association could serve as a liaison organization between Alumni and Actives and also act as an organization to recognize those members who choose to continue pursuit of the five fold purpose in their post-college lives, presenting awards for General Excellence every year at Homecoming to those Alums who achieved it and can have it verified by other Alumni. A network of available mentors for Actives and other Alums could allow us, as a group and as a community of like-minded Men, to raise each other up to higher levels of success and achievement. Ultimately, I’d like the Actives to know that the Alumni are looking out for them to help them succeed in life so that they can, in the future, do the same. Lastly, increasing Alumni giving can help the Actives run a more effective organization. Smaller amounts from significantly larger numbers of alumni results in more coming in, a greater sense of community and it also sets the example for newly-graduated to give back. An amount around $20 or so is also significantly less imposing an amount to someone who’s just graduated and has zero cashflow. If there is interest in organizing to do these things on a larger level, I am completely interested in helping to organize – I’m also completely open to input and have no problem if there is no large-scale desire among Alumni for this to happen. I want to know that I’m having an impact on those around me, and I believe that most of the rest of us want the same. If you are interested in discussing or helping to organize any of these topics, please contact me. Chris Wolf Preserving our Past The group has begun scanning our photo albums from years past in an attempt to preserve our history and make the photos more accessible to Alumni and Actives. Some of these photos will be posted on the Phi Kappa Nu photo album on Flickr. This is a temporary way for us to bring our photo album to the Alumni/Active base until our new website is complete. You can access the photo album by searching "phikappanu" on Flickr, or by clicking the link on the Newts' website. We currently have all available photos from 2000-2009 up. If you have more photos, please email them to our Historian at rlogan11@cornellcollege.edu. Have you moved? If you have recently completed a move, consider going to our website, www.cornellcollege.edu/phi_kappa_nu, to update your contact information by utilizing our online form. The process is simple, quick and convenient. |
