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Forging Connections
November/December 2003
by John Scales '54

The author is a member of the Board of Governors for the Yale Club of Pittsburgh.

Who is a Yale Club for? At the Yale Club of Pittsburgh, we believe it’s not just alumni.

In the past several years, we’ve started to involve Yale undergraduates in our social events and our outreach and scholarship work. Every single one of the projects has been fun—fun for the students and fun for those of us who still consider ourselves students. And let us not forget that Yale is supposed to be fun.

To paraphrase an old adage: one way to an undergraduate’s heart is through his or her stomach. We send care packages of snacks and cookies to each of our western Pennsylvania Yalies during finals. The thank-yous we’ve gotten in return show how much such a simple gift is appreciated by harried students studying for exams. In addition, every member of our Board of Governors writes to two or three students in early December—and encloses a $10 or $20 gift card from Starbucks.

The point of these gestures is to start forging connections between Yalies and Yale Clubs (and, by extension, between Yalies and the AYA), even before they graduate. Our students may not end up returning to western Pennsylvania, of course, but we hope that the memory of those cookies during finals will encourage them to stop by their local Yale Club wherever they end up.

We have several other projects aimed at this goal. We host a reception for the high school seniors admitted to each class. We schedule our annual Christmas party for a time when undergraduates are home for the holidays, and we make sure to invite them. And we provide free membership to all of our undergraduates enrolled at Yale—and, because undergraduates have a lot going on in their lives, we remind them of their membership in our annual December letters.

We’ve also included undergraduates in two of the club’s more substantial projects for Yale. Last fall, we sponsored a tour that brought local high school principals, teachers, and guidance counselors to the Yale campus for meetings with the admissions and financial aid offices and with the master of Saybrook. One of the best decisions we made was to involve some of our current undergraduates. I’m sure the master of Saybrook will not mind my saying that one of the highlights of the trip was a dinner with the students. They were charming, well spoken, and entirely convincing as to the outstanding merits of the Yale experience.

Like many clubs, we run a scholarship fund. This May we raised money for the fund by auctioning Yale items at our annual dinner. Quite a few of those items were donated by our undergraduates, who responded enthusiastically when we asked—sending in CDs autographed by the Baker’s Dozen, posters and tee shirts autographed by western Pennsylvania students, and a football signed by the young men on the team from our club area.

We believe that projects like these—which were created under the leadership of past presidents Steve Kline ’87 and Alice Mitinger ’85 and our current president, Ken Lund ’87—can easily be achieved by clubs of all sizes, even the smaller ones. We’ve been highly successful in drawing in people to take part. And there’s no question they’ve helped create that connectedness in which Yale rightly takes pride.

One of our star Yale Club students is Megan Nogasky ’05, a junior from Greensburg whose interest in Yale was originally sparked by members of the Pittsburgh club. “It’s a terrific network of people to have, and it’s great to talk to alums about our experiences,” Meagan has said. “I’ll definitely stay involved with Yale clubs. I’d like to return the favor.”

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