‘Pull’ more than ‘push’ for organic alumni development

Author's Biography

Mary Kay Cooper EdD, became the founding director of alumni affairs at Texas A&M University-San Antonio in October 2016, where she has established all communications, events, benefits and services for 12,000 alumni. Prior to that, she spent ten years leading the alumni engagement efforts at Trinity University, San Antonio, the result of which is an alumni association ranked 33rd in the nation by College Consensus. Her favourite industry-related volunteer activity is acting as alumni relations track chair for the CASE (the Council for Advancement and Support of Education) District IV conference each year. Before moving to alumni engagement, Mary Kay spent 15 years in student recruitment and enrolment management in private, four-year institutions in Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia. She earned her EdD in administration and leadership from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, her MA in Catholic theology from Wheeling Jesuit University, and her BA in English from Seton Hill University.

Amy C. Lewis PhD, is Associate Dean of the College of Business at Texas A&M University-San Antonio, where she is also an Associate Professor of Management. Her research interests focus on social identity, teams and managerial cognition. Her research has been published in journals such as Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Social Psychology, and the Journal of Management Education. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on topics including Organisational Behaviour, Teams, Negotiation, Motivation and Statistics. Amy earned a PhD in social psychology with a minor in statistics from Indiana University Bloomington in 2000 and a BSc in psychology from the Honors College (currently known as Barrett, the Honors College) at Arizona State University in 1994. After completing her doctorate, she trained in organisational behaviour as a post-doctoral research associate at the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah.

Weixing Ford PhD, is an assistant professor of marketing at the College of Business, Texas A&M University-San Antonio. Her research interests focus on judgment and decision-making and analytical modelling. Her research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Consumer Behaviour and International Journal of Logistics. She teaches marketing courses such as graduate seminar in marketing, consumer behaviour and marketing research. She has won teaching awards at the national as well as university level. Weixing has extensive consulting experience. She is the lead faculty for the Jaguar Business Consulting Lab at Texas A&M University-San Antonio, in which she has led students to achieve great success on their experiential learning projects for numerous companies and organisations. Weixing earned a PhD in marketing from the University of Houston, a master’s degree in business administration from Washington University in St. Louis, and a bachelor’s degree in finance from the South China University of Technology.