EMBAC Membership

I have heard this raised by other members but we don't have a lot of data. I can share that some programs are still honoring trips for alumni who were students during COVID; this is perhaps though different than what you are asking. Hopefully some members will chime in with more specifics.

@Christine Cortalano - b/c of COVID, we did offer alumni the option to travel to our already-selected residency locations (as a separate group) than the current students doing a global residency. So we had for example, two groups going to South Africa, two groups that went to UAE, two groups that went to Chile.....while the groups overlapped with the current students some in their itinerary, there were different activities planned a bit (the current students did more corporate visits and academic pieces because they were getting course credit), while the alumni group did more cultural immersion and fun. The current student group really appreciated forming bonds with alumni and learning from them, so they said it was a big hit having the two different groups sort of "together." Group size matters, as we couldn't have managed to have both groups do everything together (about 25-35 per group) as that would have diminished the experience for all and limited our options for outings/visits, etc. Happy to share more details if helpful, julie.craig@duke.edu 

Our university will not allow non-credit seeking people to be in a program with credit seeking people. In order to do something like this, we would need to have dual tracks. It’s likely that the students and the visitors could share social events and meals, but the events that were clearly about delivering The learning objectives for the trip would need to be experienced by the enrolled students independent of whatever the others on the trip did. 

We have been experiencing this situation (mixing current participants and alumni) for the elective modules due to compensation reasons linked to the pandemic. We decided to limit the % of alumni in class so that the majority was always for current participants (we tried to fix a maximum of 10-15% of the class seats for Alumni). We set very clear rules for both groups and it worked so well that we decided to make a step further and launch this possibility as a permanent alternative for alumni. I think it is key to make sure that the profile of the alumni and the profile of the current students (in terms of seniority) is similar to ensure the right level of debate and experience exchange (core in our courses). It would also be key the definition of clear rules in terms of commitment.

We don't allow our alumni to attend in global treks or modules. Some of our alumni cohorts - specifically from GEMBA - have created their own global treks, so they meet in a region, have company visits and networking opportunities. For our GEMBA modules, we always organize alumni networking events, but alumni are not invited to join our regular programming/company visits.