Alumni Consulting

While we have a specific objective for the Venice 2.0 celebrations (see Gadgets 2.0 post), it would be good, more generally, to engage the entire network of all WPI alumni to develop "real" products to solve some of the issues we encounter at all of our project centers. Many times, the recommendations that our IQP teams propose at the end of their project experiences need some "professional" follow-up, which may or may not occur depending on the resources available at our project sponsors'. Wouldn't it be good to have a mechanism in place whereby such follow-up ideas were "posted" to the WPI alumni community, so that we could follow up on our own projects? We discussed this broader concept with Dexter Bailey, who suggested exploring how we could leverage existing programs such as Engineers without Frontiers or Earthwatch to do just that. I was personally involved with Earthwatch for several years in the 1990's. My IGSD colleague Creighton Peet was an officer at Earthwatch before joining WPI. We'll explore these possibilities and keep you posted...