Issue #14: Winter/Spring 2006

One for the Heart

Remember your first days on campus? Beautiful view, right? But big. Many of us felt disoriented and lost in the great maze of buildings, oddly-named streets (East Mall? There’s no mall here!), unfamiliar faces and the challenge of getting across campus from one class to the next in seven minutes flat.
By second year we finally felt in the groove, and by fourth year it was a bit comical watching the freshmen running around in circles. But by then there were friends and familiar profs, a favourite spot beside the pool tables in The Pit, and a sense that this, finally, was our place.

After grad, some of us stayed in touch with university friends and the odd prof, but over the years UBC, both the place and the intellectual hothouse, became an old memory. Then, when we came back years later, the old feeling of strangeness and disorientation came back with us. It just wasn’t our place any more.

Part of what we do at UBC Alumni Affairs is develop programs and events that help reconnect you to both the place and the people, and that help current students – our alumni in residence – feel good about reconnecting later in life. One way of doing that is to make sure you have a place here that you can call your own. We’re aiming to create a such a space on campus for students and alumni that will always feel like “home.” This space is the UBC Alumni Centre.

Central, familiar and inviting, the UBC Alumni Centre will provide alumni a warm and welcoming space that makes it possible to plug into the campus quickly and easily. It will be located in the heart of UBC Vancouver, distinctive and green-engineered, a landmark that will be easy to find no matter what changes have occurred on the rest of campus. It will provide a place to get oriented and meet or celebrate life’s milestones. It will contain links to UBC’s past and information about its future.

The UBC Alumni Centre will include a welcome area with a staffed reception desk, social meeting areas, a wide variety of meeting rooms for large events and small volunteer committees, a café where you can meet friends for the start of day or for an afternoon glass of merlot, a library with alumni-written books, copies of archival and current publications and a Hall of Fame where you can enjoy images and materials from our collective past.

Alumni Affairs staff and volunteers have visited alumni centres in Canada, the US, Asia and elsewhere, and are researching key elements that make for a successful and engaging space. We are also assembling a team of volunteers headed by Alumni Association board member Mark Mawhinney, ba’94, to assist with planning, implementation, and fundraising.

If you would like to become involved, or if you have some suggestions for how the space should work, please contact Barney Ellis-Perry, BA ’87, Director Professional Affairs, Alumni Affairs, at 604-822-1922 or barney.ellis-perry@ubc.ca.

And prepare to engage. ¤