Alumni News

The new president of the UNH Alumni Association board of directors wants you.

Paul Caswell's primary goal this coming year will be to increase the number of alumni who volunteer for leadership positions, and who participate in alumni activities. He knows they're out there, and what they're like: alumni who loved their years at UNH but are so busy with career and family obligations that they can't find time for their alma mater. Much like, in fact, Caswell was himself not too long ago.

As a vice president at AT&T, Caswell, a member of the Class of 1960, typically worked 14 to 16 hours a day. Although he believed that the University had given him the opportunity to be successful, it wasn't until he retired and moved back to New Hampshire from New York City in 1992 that he realized he wanted to reconnect with UNH.

"I missed out because I didn't stay in touch," he says. "I continue to meet alumni who have a great interest in UNH and who would like to be involved, but nobody's reached out in a way that touches them. There's a big void that we've got to fill, and that will be one of the challenges."

Second only perhaps to a good game of golf, Caswell likes a challenge. He's planning on applying his business expertise to help the board and alumni staff management assess which programs are working well and which need to be improved. Sixty percent of UNH's alumni live outside the state, and half have graduated since 1982, he points out. "We need to broaden the scope and the diversity of the people who are participating," he says.

He wants the Alumni Association to be an active partner in the upcoming capital campaign, and he would like to see more alumni participation in the initiative to seek adequate funding for the University from the legislature. The association itself needs to become more fiscally independent from UNH, he adds.

With a clear strategy and increased participation, Caswell feels confident "we'll reach the goal of becoming one of the best public university alumni associations in the nation."

E-mail Forwarding, a new online system, is now offered by the UNH Alumni Association.

A free service that forwards e-mail messages to UNH alumni, new graduates and students wherever they are, E-mail Forwarding provides subscribers with a permanent UNH e-mail address, such as a.b.smith@ alumni.unh.edu. All e-mail messages sent to the UNH address will be forwarded to the alumnus/a's destination e-mail address.

E-mail Forwarding is essentially a lifelong e-mail address that will never change, and the service will be especially helpful to new graduates and to alumni who change their e-mail address often. Instead of notifying dozens of friends and relatives every time their e-mail address changes, alumni will only have to notify the Alumni Online Services system. The service allows alumni to request a personalized UNH e-mail address (Abby.Smith@alumni.unh.edu instead of a.b.smith@alumni.unh.edu, for example) on a first-come, first-served basis.

E-mail Forwarding is an expansion of Online Services, an online database which was launched in June 1998 with an alumni E-mail Directory, for looking up e-mail addresses of classmates and friends; a Business Network, for listing and finding alumni businesses; e-mail discussion groups; a weekly e-mail newsletter, The UNH Connection; and a link to UNH classified ads. Additional services are planned for the near future.

The new system, as well as the original Online Services database, was developed by UNH alumni publications interim editor Meg Torbert and UNH Research Computing Center systems manager Patrick Messer '83, '85G. The system is hosted by RCC, using a Netscape Enterprise server on an SGI workstation, and an interface to Oracle using Netscape's Livewire Pro. Tom Baker '87, RCC systems programmer, configured the mail server.

To sign up for E-mail Forwarding, alumni and students may visit the alumni Web site, which offers an extensive menu of resources and information, at http://www.unh.edu/alumni/.