#proudmoment
Your Hult Alumni Relations team reflects on the challenges and achievements of this past year.
Katharine Boshkoff
Vice President, Global Career Development and Alumni Relations
Today marks my 326th day working from home. Being “people” people, my team and I thrive on the energy of in-person engagement. Yet, like me, many of my team, our students, professors, and alumni are working remotely, tethered only by thin virtual connections. We’ve all been challenged by displacement from campus, constant change, and the need for the daily personal adaptions of living in a pandemic. Through all of this, we still keep the same priorities front-and-center: supporting our alumni community, educating students, and helping grads and alums get jobs in a brutal and challenging job market. Hult doesn’t stop even when the rest of the world goes on pause. Innovations like our DBA roll out as planned. We mobilize and quickly launch new alumni skilling options like the MIB-MBA Leap or the Live Online Masters in Business Analytics. Everyone masters Zoom and learns how to teach hybrid, online-only, or make quick switches in format when campuses close or reopen on short notice. I sit in admiration of my colleagues and staff. It takes courage, resiliency, and fortitude—and they brought it. Bunkering at home, alums are my lifelines out to the global community. They’ve inspired me with their generosity, loyalty to the school, and willingness to help students and each other. They remind me every day what’s possible when you dream really big and put in everything you’ve got. There is always a way—you just have to find it.
Resilience is not something that can be taught, it’s something you accumulate through experience. I am a Hult alum and one of the valuable lessons I learned at Hult is that it’s not what happens around you that is important, it’s how you choose to let it affect you. Each and every person in this special edition publication represents this idea, and I am in awe of each of their stories. In 2020 I saw my hometown, Beirut, burn to the ground and I couldn’t get there. Later might not always be a possibility; there really is no time like the present. Because of my alumni network (including Olga, also a Hult alum) I never, not for a minute, felt alone and I mean that quite literally! In 2020 alone, we had over 500 alumni coming to our online Happy Hours, over 3000 joining our online webinars, and over 500 attending online electives. When Olga and I launched these ↳ new online initiatives, we didn’t really know what to expect but we knew that we wanted to create an online space for alumni to come together and support one another during challenging times and that’s exactly what happened: our community flourished and so many of you joined in and shared your stories. Things might not be going according to our plan, and this might continue for a while still. Generations have lived and prospered over centuries, despite the many challenges in history. It’s our turn now.
Alik Jebejian
Alumni Relations Manager
Olga Ivanova
Global Head of Alumni and Corporate Relations Europe
When the pandemic hit and a lot of the world went into lockdown, I was amazed at how quickly alumni started reaching out wanting to give back to the community. There was this amazingly powerful, collaborative, positive energy amid all the disruption in the world. In difficult times you cannot thrive alone— you can survive and push through—but it’s when everyone comes together every single person comes out with their own wins. Throughout 2020, Hult alumni took advantage of the global online space and created powerful initiatives for knowledge sharing. Our ADL alum, Andrew Boyarsky, did a workshop on crisis management and pandemic planning, Hult Alumni Committee member, Rob Oomen, arranged a ↳ series of webinars on the Circular Economy, the San Francisco Alumni Chapter introduced a monthly ↳ open mic event to highlight alumni and their initiatives, and many more. This year, we moved the ↳ Global Alumni Day online for the first time and we weren’t sure what to expect. We were absolutely astonished when 1,200 alumni attended. I felt so proud to be a Hult alum on that day, seeing how resilient our Hult family is.
