The network of Denisonians is nearly 40,000 strong.

They are business people, entrepreneurs, educators, lawyers, doctors, artists, civil servants, and much more. They live and work everywhere, across the nation and around the world. And we hear this over and over: they love the college, and they love being part of Denison's culture of mentorship. They are, without question, our most valuable resource for careers support in the Knowlton Center.

Individually and collectively, our alumni are extremely well positioned to reach a hand back to help their successors on campus. Not only do they have wisdom to offer about applying their Denison education in the real world, but connecting with current students allows them to feel connected with what's happening at Denison today.

Our Denison@Work program allows alumni to work with and mentor students in seven main ways. They can be a mentor, offer a job, offer an internship, host an extern, connect on LinkedIn, and join our Parents & Alumni for Career Exploration (P.A.C.E.) Team.

Coaching and mentorship

The goal for college students should not be just to find a job, but to build a life. One of the best ways to help our students explore the kinds of lives they want to lead lead and the ways they can develop careers to support those lives is through entorship and coachingl. Faculty, staff, alumni, parents, community members and others can be engaged as mentors who catalyze students, encouraging them to ask good questions, develop goals, and learn to achieve.

Alumni and parents are key to this process

Denison, like many great colleges, boasts an incredibly strong alumni network. We engage them early in our students’ education, bringing them to campus to tell the stories of their lives. Students need to hear about how careers unfold in unpredictable ways and the huge array of paths people take to build successful lives. One of the programs we have developed to address this is called NextGen, which brings recent graduates back to campus for short residencies. We are finding that students crave interactions with our graduates of the last decade or so. We also have built a new online tool called Handshake, where students can pose questions and have discussions with alumni. It helps our students to create connections and develop relationships within this network of interested and successful professionals.

Internships & externships

Students benefit from multiple internships & externships, which help them to explore different sectors, work on skills, and start to develop networks. Our network of alumni and parents offer high-quality experiences for our students, and the college creates events and opportunities for self-reflection that add layers of learning outcomes to the experience.

For example, the Knowlton Center offers a suite of summer fellowship programs. Denison students are placed in cities where they have internships during the day, and then use their evenings and weekends to connect with alumni, parents and other friends of the college, who can provide advice and offer short seminars on profession-specific skills and workplace topics, like ethics, networking, leadership, and other issues that impact each work sector and field of employment.