When students get to college, a number of aspects of their lives change. For me, going to college was the first time I was away from home and my parents for more than a week or two, opening up a whole new world of freedom. As an undergrad at Yale, I can get froyo every day if I want, I get to take classes that interest me (not just the ones required to graduate), and I don’t even have to show up to those classes because nobody will go looking for me (I still go, of course).
As is almost always the case, with freedom comes responsibility, and for college students, one of the most daunting new responsibilities—which becomes increasingly important and stressful as we near graduation—is finding a summer internship and then eventually a job.
It’s tougher than you might think—being a rising junior in college looking for a summer internship, especially in the Boston area. A firm typically looks for rising seniors to intern with the hope that if its interns are up to snuff, they might accept full-time work at the firm the following year. Yet from many accounts, those rising juniors who are fortunate enough find internships often tackle the exciting work of endless data entry and coffee runs.
So I jumped into the networking world in search of something different, something where I could contribute to my company and learn. I reached out to one of the only Milton Academy alums I knew worked in the Boston area, Meredith Nelson, desperately hoping that her new company EverTrue might have a position for me. Initially, I had only a vague idea of what EverTrue does. It’s some app for networking or something, right?
Only after emailing and talking to Meredith—who encouraged me to check out their EverTrue app for Milton—did I realize that EverTrue’s app would have helped me with my earlier struggles locating an internship. It put a vast pool of viable contacts for internships in the Boston area right at my finger tips. It would have been nice during those few months of internship searching to have opened up a the app to a map of Boston with pins indicating all the Milton alums in the area. So much irony.
The more I used the app, the more I realized its power and superiority over any other networking tool I had at my disposal. And then I learned about GivingTree. The frustrated swimmer in me came out and I thought, “Man, if Milton had had this when I was high school, or even middle school, it might have finally been possible to find donors for that pool they don’t have.” With my interest in EverTrue piquing, a few phone calls with Meredith, Courtney, and Kat, made it clear that EverTrue was where I needed to work. They explained that being a part of the EverCrew means making serious contributions every day with a team of people who are passionate about why we do what we do, where this company is going, and the innovations to the nonprofit industry that we’re making. I had fallen in love with EverTrue.
Basically, EverTrue provides the seemingly miraculous solution to networking frustrations that I, other students, and educational institutions continually face, and I’m lucky enough both to utilize and contribute to this company. I believe everything happens for a reason: Undergoing that frustrating internship search made me appreciate EverTrue from an alum’s perspective, which caused me to hop on the ship with the EverCrew. Now I get to improve the alumni networking experience and, most importantly, help revolutionize educational fundraising.
Now that you’ve gotten a peek into what the EverTrue app can do for alumni like Vince, find out what it’s done for the advancement office at Union College.