Since 1999 Northwestern alumna Susan K. Jones and her husband have made annual international trips. But unlike an average vacation, these trips were organized by NU.
The Northwestern Alumni Association has had an alumni travel program since the late 1960s to strengthen alumni-university relations, said Jay Mastin, NU’s director of alumni education and travel.
“It’s not just getting on a boat and going on a tour somewhere,” Mastin said. “It’s educational in nature. It all comes back to learning all they can learn and seeing all they can see.”
Jones, Medill ’71, and her husband recently took a summer trip to Russia. She visited cities such as St. Petersburg, Russia, and Moscow with faculty members from NU and Duke University.
“We had enough Northwestern people that we had a professor there,” Jones said. “Irwin Weil is an emeritus professor, and his specialty is Russian literature and social science. He had been (to Russia) every year since the ’60s, so he knew a lot.”
The NAA offers between 30 and 40 eight- or nine-day trips a year. These trips send alumni to many different parts of the world and also expose them to some educational elements. The system was designed to “foster a feeling of connectedness and a sense of belonging between the travelers and the university and NAA,” Mastin said.
Most of the travel packages come from different travel vendors, the main one being Alumni Holidays International. The NAA also offers “educational escapades,” which are exclusive customized trips for NU affiliates, Jones said.
Both types of trips include lectures by faculty members or local guides, guided excursions, group activities and an NU host. The educational escapades go a step further by uniting travel activities under a topic and offering additional dialogue with NU alumni who work in the area.
One of the most popular educational escapades is the Broadway Weekend trip to New York, Mastin said. Participants enjoy a four-day weekend in New York, attending shows that feature NU alumni and conversing with them in post-show discussions.
The weekend trip appeals to a wider range of alumni than longer international trips because some recent graduates cannot leave work for eight or nine days. Cost, which runs between $2,000 to $3,000 for trips to Europe, is relative to the person’s age, Jones said.
“For a middle-aged or older alum, that’s a time period that’s doable and the cost to them relative to a similar trip they might plan is very reasonable,” she said. “We stayed at a hotel in Rome that was elegant, but not five-star. You don’t get to stay at the Ritz for what you pay, but it’s always a pleasant, clean, safe place.”
NU’s alumni travel has such a reputation that Alumni Holidays International has included the NAA in discussions about launching an independent alumni travel program, according to Mastin. The new program would offer online booking to individuals rather than groups, but still maintain a connection to the university.
“We’re one of three to five universities to be offered to try a pilot project,” Mastin said. “This is new territory for alumni travel because we’ve always focused on group educational travel.”
Jones said she always has enjoyed the original group travel programs because of their affordable prices and good accommodations, but these were not her favorite aspects of the trips.
“In a Northwestern group, first you have that Northwestern connection and you know they’re all pretty smart,” said Jones. “I would say that’s what the number one attraction is.”
Reach Christina Liao at [email protected].
