Letter from Department

Dear CEU Gender Studies Alumnae and Alumni,

Greetings from your alma mater department! As the new Department Head, and on behalf of the whole faculty, I am writing to encourage more contact with our alumnae/i and to ask for your help in continuing to recruit outstanding students to CEU Gender Studies.

2006 will mark the tenth anniversary of our program (an event, scheduled for Fall 2006, celebrating this anniversary is currently in the planning phase—we will let you know about the details in email as well as on our website as the plans are finalized). In this time we’ve grown a lot, adding new permanent faculty members and an array of exciting visiting faculty. Our new and improved website provides profiles of these new faces, along with those of “old” faces you will recognize from your time at CEU.

Our doctoral program, launched in 2002, continues to thrive and we anticipate with pleasure graduating our first Ph.D.’s quite soon. We are also in the process of developing a 2-year MA degree in response to the changes in higher education in the rest of Europe. And we are formulating a program that would place MA students as interns in gender-related NGOs in the summer following graduation. And of course, our oldest program, the one-year MA, continues to be one of the most established gender studies graduate programs in Europe.

Nevertheless, we face several challenges with the development of new gender studies programs all over Europe. We of course welcome this and we are already exploring the possibilities for exchanges and joint degree programs with some of these new departments. But we also find ourselves competing with them for the best students, and so we turn to you as alumnae/i to help us in several ways.
First, it would be very helpful for us to know about your activities since graduation, both to keep track of the kinds of things students go on to do after completing our program, and so that we can publicize full statistics to better attract students. I therefore ask you to please fill out the enclosed survey. We’re very curious to know what you’ve been up to and we’d like to keep in touch. We’re also working on evaluating our MA program, and as a part of that process, we would like you to send you a survey at a later time. It would help us tremendously if you could take some time to fill out these surveys.

Second, I would like your help with recruitment of quality students to the CEU Gender Studies Department. As alumnae/i, your achievements are the best “advertisement” we have for our program. Many of you are also in contact with potential applicants. I ask you to promote the program where you can and encourage those who are interested. The survey provides instructions on how you can request our recent brochures and posters to distribute in your area. It also asks for volunteers for our alumnae/i network. Volunteers would agree to be contacted by perspective applicants and be a general point of contact for the department for your region. Finally, the survey asks whether you work with an organization that might want to host a summer intern from our program. Organizations would not be required to provide pay or housing, but would offer the interns meaningful gender-related work experience.

We are interested in creating and maintaining a community of Gender Studies alumnae/i. With this in mind, this space for alumnae/i will highlight the achievements of our graduates. By filling out our survey, you will ensure that your information is included on the website (unless you instruct us to not reveal your information). We would also like to help interested graduates find each other and keep in touch and will try to develop a way to do this through the website. And of course we’re always very interested in your ideas for recruitment of new students, alumnae/i activities, or other ways to support our program and create a community that extends beyond CEU.

Since coming to CEU Gender Studies last year, I have been most impressed by the quality of our students and the many interesting and important things they go on to do after graduation. I hope you will stay in touch and I wish you continued success in your personal and professional development.

Sincerely,

Allaine Cerwonka
Head of Department & Associate Professor
Department of Gender Studies
Central European University

Alumni/ae Gender Studies Survey

Download, fillout and return the survey.