Central campus has been receiving quite the face lift since you graduated last year.

If you’re local, you should take a walk through and see all of the activity. If you’re not farther away or dislike walks, you can check out the pictures below.

Some of the major projects include the new STEM complex, which replaces Angell and Cook (and includes a renovated Votey) :

A new residence hall, which replaces the CBW (aka. the shoeboxes):

And Alumni House, which will serve as a home on campus for alumni just like you:

Happy 4th of July! We hope you enjoy a great weekend celebrating with family and friends. And eating hot dogs. Can’t forget about the hot dogs.

Now that you’ve had a few weeks to get acquainted with the blog, we thought it was time to introduce ourselves. We’re Ryan Chartier ’10 and Derrick Dubois ’13, two UVM grads working for the UVM Foundation who have a focus on young alumni.

Ryan: I’m a two time grad of UVM with a BA and MA in English. I’ve been in Burlington for the past decade and started working at the UVM Foundation in 2014. I work in the Office of Annual Giving, running the UVM Chatty Cats phonathon program and thinking of ways to engage young alums.

I enjoy getting out and meeting alums like you and I hope to meet some of you throughout the course of this year. 

Derrick: I graduated from UVM with dual degrees in mathematics and geography. Here at the UVM Foundation I’m part of the Alumni Relations team. My focus is on keeping young alumni connected to UVM and to each other. I travel around the country visiting with alums like you and hosting regional events. 

You may see me at Happy Hours like the one in Burlington last night or the one in Boston next Thursday night. I hope we get a chance to meet this year.

Our job is to help you navigate your first year out by sharing advice and tips that we’ve learned from our own experience and from other young alumni who’ve been through this transition. We’re also here to help you stay connected with UVM. We’ll be your source for what’s happening on campus and we’ll help you understand what it means to be an alum.

In a nutshell, we’re here to help you. Please feel free to reach out with any questions or if there’s anything you need here at UVM. Ryan: ryan.chartier@uvm.edu & Derrick: derrick.dubois@uvm.edu.

We know it’s only been two weeks since you graduated and you probably aren’t feeling nostalgic for your alma mater yet. Good, that would be kind of weird. 

And you’re probably wondering right now what this blog is all about.

Well, first off – we’re not asking you for anything. This isn’t a secret trick to ask you for money or complete a survey or barrage your inbox with useless information.

This blog is the afterword to your UVM story. We’re here to keep you connected to UVM, Burlington, and to your classmates.

And, we’re here to help you write your next chapter. We’re recent grads like you, we work at the UVM Foundation and Alumni Association and our job is to help you (and occasionally eat ice cream and take silly photos).

Unlike your parents, we don’t expect you to know everything right now. You’re under a lot of pressure to plan the rest of your life (whether you have a job, a place to live, or neither) and we want to give you a place to feel at home.

We’ve been doing this for the past year with the Class of 2015 on this blog, so we are really excited to bring you in, talk to you, and be as helpful as we can.

Here’s how we’re going to help.

• Give you lots of career, jobs, and grad school advice, tips, and resources. And we’ll skip the generic stuff and give you relevant advice – like this post on how to ace a job interview.
• Tell you about events with fellow alumni. Like these upcoming young alumni socials in a few cities.
• Showcase examples of other alumni and how they spent their first year after graduation. For example, read the ups and downs of Trevon Novia ’14.
• Make you feel great about being a UVM alum. That means we’ll do some silly things, give some stuff away, and generally keep you entertained and amused.

Basically, this is all about you. Your afterwards is worthy of making our afterword.

~Ryan & Derrick

Class of 2015, you have some new friends on the blog.

With the Class of 2016’s newly minted diplomas, you aren’t the youngest alumni anymore. Sad, but true.

We’re bringing them into the Afterword fold this week and we’ll be talking to both of you — usually in separate posts. So don’t be surprised if there are some extra posts that may not be as relevant to you — we’re trying to bring them up-to-speed.

But, feel free to mingle and we hope you’ll give them some great advice along the way.

~Derrick & Ryan