Alumni Outreach & Symposium Planning

Unit Description

Humanities Engage (HE) fosters a culture change in how arts and humanities departments, faculty, and doctoral students in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences envisage the broader importance of humanities Ph.D.s and the societal impact of humanistic training.

With generous support from the Mellon Foundation, funding supports the design and implementation of discipline-based and interdisciplinary curricular changes across humanities doctoral programs, an ambitious immersive fellowship program across non-profit, public, and corporate sectors, and modernizing the culture of doctoral advising and mentoring.

Humanities Engage’s project objectives include alumni outreach, building a robust, visible, and sustainable program of alumni engagement. For our Symposium, humanists practicing in different sectors (e.g., academic; public/government: federal/state/local; different industries; non-profit world at large) will be invited to visit campus to participate in public fora and offer workshops. In addition, there will be opportunities doctoral mentoring and networking. The Symposium may include alumni roundtables, presentations from HE awardees and authors of innovative dissertations, mentoring and networking opportunities, professional competency workshops, career diversity exploration, and informational interviews.

Eligibility

DSAS Humanities Ph.D. students who expect to be enrolled in fall 2022. 

Stipend

$1,600 for ca. 80 hours of effort in summer 2022

Internship Project Overview

Humanities Engage seeks an Administrative Intern for 80 hours of commitment to aid with humanities doctoral alumni outreach, as well as logistics for the late summer/early fall Humanities Symposium.

Responsibilities include:

• Liaise with the University’s Alumni Association and Center for Doctoral and Postdoctoral Career Development to access alum questionnaires and explore existing doctoral alumni networks
• Use Pitt Commons, research, evaluate, and report on current alumni engagement and possibilities for expansion/improvement
• Access existing databases of humanities alumni to identify potential alum speakers for upcoming Symposium
• Consult individual humanities departments on existing, department-specific alumni outreach
• Outreach and communication with individual humanities alumni
• Assist the Director of Graduate Advising and Engagement for the Humanities and the Humanities Engage Project Coordinator with Symposium planning, logistics, and promotion.
• Attend (in person or remotely), Humanities Engage meetings as needed
• Other duties that may not be explicitly listed, including collaboration with Graduate Studies

Qualifications

• Comfort with “cold” contacting alumni, internal, and external stakeholders
• Commitment to the “public humanities” as a project
• Familiarity with events programming or interest in learning about events programming
• Strong writing, communications, and social media skills
• Ability to follow timeline and meet deadlines
• Self-starting, ability to work independently and take ownership of responsibilities/tasks

Host Unit Mentor

Melissa Lenos is Senior Director of Graduate Advising and Engagement for the Humanities. Her B.A. in English and M.A. in English, Critical and Cultural Studies are from the University of Pittsburgh and her Ph.D. in Mass Media and Communication is from Temple University. Melissa's primary research areas are narratology and media pedagogy; her work has appeared in Cinema Journal, In Media Res, and Antenna. She is co-author (with Michael Ryan) of An Introduction to Film Analysis: Technique and Meaning in Narrative Film and (with Kevin L. Ferguson) of the forthcoming Generation X: The Popular Culture that Defined the MTV Generation.

Application

See here for terms and application instructions.