Last month, DePaul’s Kellstadt Graduate School of Business hosted a reunion and networking event for alumni. These types of event are common at business schools, but this particular event was special because of where it took place: in China.
The reunion was held at the Fairmont Peace Hotel on The Bund in Shanghai, and was organized by Hui Lin, DePaul’s Associate Director of Regional Initiatives for China.
“We haven’t had a formal event like this before, and everybody was really excited to be re-connecting with other alumni,” says Lin, who teaches accounting at DePaul’s Kellstadt Graduate School of Business.
Phoebe Shijun Li, a 2014 DePaul alum, said; “I really appreciate Professor Lin … for creating this awesome reunion opportunity for Chinese alumni and inviting us to attend. The reception brought us together from different industries after graduation. With this precious opportunity, we had a chance to know more people, learn from each other and reunite with our university professors and old friends.” Li, Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Honghai Glass Inc., traveled over 300 miles to attend the event
More than 60 DePaul alumni who live and work in China attended. This includes Gengyan Xu, MBA ’16, a Management Trainee at Haitong Securities in Shanghai. Xu called the event “a great opportunity to network with alumni and make new friends.”
“I appreciated DePaul staff’s hard work and look forward to next year’s reception,” Xu said.
Word spread of the event through a WeChat social media group that targeted DePaul alumni in China. The online group has 266 followers so far. In fact, the success of the Shanghai event has inspired alumni in Shenzhen to organize their own reunion in May through a new Shenzhen-area alumni WeChat group with 76 members.
“We’ve received very positive feedback, including interest in our having another event in the future,” Lin said.