An alumnus shares why she loves her local chapter events
Throughout her two degrees at Waterloo, Christina Hassan (MPH ’16) developed strong connections in the Waterloo community. After moving to Calgary, she and her husband Hyder Hassan (BA ’12) joined their local alumni chapter to keep that connection alive.
Read on to see three things you can gain from joining an alumni chapter, according to Christina.
Alumni chapters offer a variety of ways to connect with other people. The Calgary chapter, for example, offers family-focused events, educational events and social events that feature after-work drinks. Regardless of your interests, all the chapter events provide opportunities to meet new people and make new friends.
Christina finds it easy to socialize with fellow alumni, no matter their age or background. “Everybody who has graduated from the University of Waterloo has spent at least three years living that life,” she explains. “In a certain respect, we speak the same language… and at the end of the day, there’s a little piece of remembering back when we were at Waterloo.”
Plus, Christina has built lasting connections with other alumni in the Calgary chapter: “You gain real connections with these people. These are the people who I call on when I am doing something in the community and need help. I know that these are people who want to be connected with the Calgary community too.”
If you’re after professional connections, chapter events are a great place for networking. According to Christina, networking happens between chapter members regularly.
“There are a lot of engineers from Waterloo who are working in Calgary,” she says. “So there is a natural networking piece that happens within the chapter. And then there’s the IT professionals too. We’ve had some events going on specifically for people working in the IT space.”
Whether the event is focused on networking or not, the chapter can help to build your local connections.
For Christina, one of the best parts about the alumni chapter is experiencing her new home of Calgary: “I got access to different things going on in the city that I wouldn’t have been aware of otherwise. “
CHRISTINA HASSAN, MPH '14
I love when the chapter takes advantage of great things in our community and tags the Waterloo connection onto it. Those events are really valuable to me.
Christina has discovered some “typical Calgarian” events through the Waterloo alumni chapter, like ZooLights, a family winter event that brings holiday lights to the Calgary Zoo. She also attended an educational event about artificial intelligence, which she discovered because of her connection to Math alumni. She sees it as an opportunity to explore and connect to her home city, while also keeping her connection to her Waterloo community.
“I love when the chapter takes advantage of great things in our community and tags the Waterloo connection onto it,” she says. “Those events are really valuable to me.”
Waterloo alumni can join chapters in 10 locations across the world:
