Every week, The Talon interviews a member of the Oklahoma Christian University community, a “Newsmaker,” to answer questions about their role on campus.
On February 23, The Talon interviewed Director of Alumni Relations, Aubrie Ross.
What does a typical day in your life look like?
“My initial answer would be every day is different. It’s a little different because my job is relational, and so I think to make it more simplified, being relational my job involves a lot of interactions with people. That’s my consistent, daily conversing or interacting somehow with people. Then throw in there some events or meetings.”
What is the impact of your job? Can you share a story or two about how alumni are impacted by staying in touch with the school?
“Well, you mentioned staying in touch with the school, that’s a good way to kind of encapsulate a lot of the purpose of my job is to keep people connected to the school. Our alumni definition is anybody who has been a student for more than one semester, so that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a graduate. One of the things that we consider to be impactful or successful in is when an alum is contributing back in some way. It might be monetary, but it also might be coming up and mentoring a student, or replying to some communications about encouragement or something like that shows that they still care, right? I think I would say we have a great success rate in that overall. One of those ways, I will say, is we have an over 60% of our university employment are Oklahoma Christian alums, and that says a lot about our school. It says that they cared enough about their experience to want to reciprocate that to current students. If you look around and did research in other universities, it is a very high percentage and we’re not a huge school. So it says even more about that ratio.”
How does the alumni office keep alumni engaged with OC after graduation?
“Some of our bullet point ways that we keep our alums engaged are our monthly communications via email. We also have a newsletter that goes out every single month to all alumni that gives them insight into campus things, also things related just to alumni. We also do an annual magazine that goes out to alumni, and that is in partnership with our creative services, but that comes from our office, we also have just various similar communications throughout the year. Another way is inviting them to campus to participate in events or participate in classes. We have a National Alumni Council, that’s an invitation group of alums who have been invited to come be part of an auxiliary group that advocates for the school, they come to Oklahoma Christian twice a year. They have meetings all day long with people coming in from all over campus, giving them information relevant to the time, and then they go back out in their communities and they share that. It helps of course with multiple things, every department, it helps admissions, it helps us. We also are part of the school’s fundraising team, we have a responsibility to raise funding for programs and raise funding for the general scholarships.”
What do you find most rewarding about directing and working in alumni relations?
The most rewarding thing I would say is also my favorite thing, for me is the relational piece. I love hearing people’s stories. I love knowing what’s important to people, and I get that from being here on campus and learning about who you all are and who students are. And of course, that leads later into why. I have loved being able to see who people are, as a student, who they become, and now on to flip over to those alums. So, you know, there’s obviously a lot of alums that are younger than me, but there’s a lot that’s older than me, and so I have had such a benefit of meeting so many people that have such fondness and great stories about their experience at Oklahoma Christian. So that is my very favorite part of those connections.”
How does your job further the mission of OC as a “Kingdom University”?
“One of the biggest ways that it does is that we have a huge responsibility to communicate that out to the alumni, the Kingdom way messages. A lot of their knowledge about that comes out of our office. That’s a huge way, we’re helping them understand what that means for our university now. That’s the practical way. We’re trying to get President Jones in front of groups of people, and we want them to hear it from him. So we have a lot of breakout groups that we schedule on purpose so that they can know what that means. We also have an upcoming student group that speaks to alumni and let them know like, how do you see that on campus? We want our alums to feel how real it is that this is being implemented on campus, and what ways that are being seen through our eyes, but more clearly how the students are seeing that. We hope that we’re also using that message in our everyday lives. That’s the whole point. So, within our jobs, and every single role within our team we want to be sure that we’re showing honesty, love, unity, trust, respect, so that filters over, not only into our team but that it shows how we interact with the students. Or how we interact with alumni, and just that it’s a natural way about how we go about things. That’s what we hope our alumni see in our campus. It’s been very positive, because when they come to campus, they do see it, and when they hear somebody speak, they know it. Our biggest way we do that is by showing them and telling them what’s happening.”
What does the alumni office do for alums regarding Spring Sing?
“That’s a big weekend for everybody, right? It is all hands-on deck for all of campus. Spring Sing is actually one of our biggest engagement weekends. We have a lot of digital communications that go out about what’s going on. It’s not just the general whole alumni, but we also break that down into clubs, they get their own communications to what their clubs are doing. We connect with the alumni directors of each club at the beginning of the year, and we meet with them and help them. So, we work with them throughout the year so that they can best communicate with their clubs alumni. We want to empower them to do that, that is facilitated through our office, but the clubs do that. We have a booth that’s set up during Spring Sing weekend, like a check in, as a way to engage with them and show them that we’re here. We usually have our magazines out, t-shirts or something that we’re giving away. It’s a way for us to connect. We partner with admissions that weekend, so we connect with our alumni, who are bringing students for spring visit. We have a lot of overlaps when we do that for Eagle for day, we do that with admissions as well. So, most of it is just a presence, information and presence.”
What was your journey in reaching this position?
“My great love for OC, its mission, and what I hoped to give back. I attended Oklahoma Christian as a student and when I came, I thought I was going to do education. I started that, almost finished it, then realized I wanted to change so I went into business. When I graduated, I went into event planning and did that all the way up until I started working here five years ago. I was a wedding planner for about 20 years; I also did special events. I had some other special events during that time frame, as well as having a family and kids and all that. I became the mission’s coordinator for our Memorial Road Church of Christ elementary age kids, and that led me to starting a nonprofit. I have a 501©3 that I’m the director of and that partners with Memorial Road in Ghana, Africa, and so I paired those two pieces of experiences, and was encouraged to apply for this job so it kind of came to me and when it came to. For 44 years as the director of Alumni Relations. So, when I was approached, I was like, that sounds really odd, but he would think I could do the same thing he could, but also a really high honor in my head, because I watched my dad work here for that long and lived on this campus basically with him. And so I thought, wow, okay, that’s something that I never expected to be asked to do, but what a cool opportunity to be able to continue in those footsteps. And so, he retired in 2018 so there was kind of an interim of a couple different people that filled the gap, but not an actual person in the role. And so I was the next person in the role after that accepted it.”
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