Christina Allen walks onto the Carnegie Mellon campus, no longer as a student, but as one of the many parents sticking close to the child she is about to leave for freshman orientation. Unlike the other parents, she knows her way around from her own years studying here in the 1980s. She takes her daughter, Elle Allen, to see her old haunts—the industrial design studios, the computer labs, and the robotics labs. They walk into the University Center. Allen is envious. She jokes with Elle about the old student center, which despite the many good times she had there, looked more like a moldy set of a horror movie.
Although Allen’s campus days are long gone, she remains very much involved in collegiate life, not just because her daughter is at Carnegie Mellon. Connecting with college students is a big part of her job. She works at LinkedIn, a professional networking Web site where users maintain their own profile pages that can include an in-depth professional history: current position, past positions, professional recommendations, education, and much more. Users can then seek out and also accept “connections” (with other LinkedIn users) to create an online professional networking community.
LinkedIn hired Allen in 2010 to lead the Student Initiative, with a mission to make the Web site more enticing to college students. As director of product management, Allen worked with her team to find ways to best utilize the bond alumni feel toward other alumni from their alma maters. She says the Student Initiative now taps into that bond by assisting students even before they graduate. They can get insight about future career decisions by going to their college’s LinkedIn homepage and find helpful information about other alumni:
- where they live
- what they do
- where they work
- when they attended college
Allen’s daughter Elle, for example, today a sophomore mechanical engineering student, can go to linkedin.com/college, select San Francisco (the city where she hopes to work after graduation), choose the field engineering, and discover what companies there have hired Carnegie Mellon alumni. Elle can then view profiles for those people, even reach out to them via LinkedIn, to ask questions or even query about career opportunities. And, after Elle graduates, she can use the LinkedIn site to stay connected to her classmates—everything from receiving alerts about career moves to learning about events in her area.
In addition to Allen, several Carnegie Mellon alumni work at LinkedIn, and three of the company’s recent acquisitions have roots with the university:
- CardMunch: a business card transcription service, founded by Bowei Gai (E’06, ’07), Sid Viswanathan (E’06), Sudeep Yegnashankaran (E’09), and Manu Kumar (E’95, CS’97, TPR’99)
- IndexTank: a hosted search service, founded by Diego Basch (CS’98)
- mSpoke: a provider of personalized content recommendation, cofounded by Dave Mawhinney (TPR’90), Dean Thompson (CS’89), and Sean Ammirati
Whenever Allen comes across alumni, she says, “I recognize them right away. There’s something unique about an education at CMU.” She thinks it’s because Carnegie Mellon students have more experience collaborating across fields, not only in theoretical work, but also in hands-on experience. LinkedIn, she adds, makes a point to evaluate its new hires—where they come from, how they perform on the job, and who fits best into their culture. Carnegie Mellon alumni, she notes with pride, regularly get high marks, which is why LinkedIn makes sure never to miss recruiting opportunities at the university.
Allen found herself developing an entrepreneurial spirit while earning her undergraduate degree in Industrial Design in 1985 and later, in 1988, earning her graduate degree in a new program that taught designers computer programming. That spirit came in handy, she says, when she was faced with getting the Student Initiative off the ground.
With an appreciation for her education, it’s no surprise she’s delighted to watch her daughter walk around the same campus she called home nearly 30 years ago. But she points out that she never pressured Elle to choose where to go to college. She didn’t want to be one of “those” parents. But as Elle started looking into robotics programs, it prompted her mom to dust off memories from her college days. She suddenly recalled a giant robot spider some students built and then took for a ride around the Cut: “And that was just a normal day on campus.” Allen, it turned out, worked in the Robotics Institute throughout her undergraduate and graduate years, learning AI and programming in addition to design. The chance to build robots while exploring multiple fields—design, programming, art, engineering, humanities—is something Allen considered the chance of a lifetime.
Now Elle, in her second year, is making her own memories, often telling her mom about her “normal days” at college.
When parents’ weekend rolls around, they take turns showing off their favorite hangouts. Elle points out to her mom a new pan-Asian fusion restaurant on campus. Allen muses about a different kind of fare a few miles away—Ritter’s Diner, where she tells Elle about a legend she met there: Mr. Rogers. Of course, when mother and daughter walk around campus, Elle steers her mom into a robotics lab to check out a robot Elle helped create. Her mom blurts out, “I wish I was going to college again! I want to be doing that.”
After Elle tears her mom away, they walk onto the Cut, where on this day there are no students riding robot spiders, just a few people throwing a Frisbee. It’s almost time for dinner. They discuss who will choose the restaurant. Both have their own ideas.
Olivia London (DC’13) is a third-year English major at Carnegie Mellon and has become a regular contributor to this magazine.
