Strength in Numbers: Celebrating 10 Years of SAA

By: Kari Lloyd | Categories: Alumni Interest, Campus News

For 10 years, the Georgia Tech Student Alumni Association has been connecting generations of Yellow Jackets to celebrate the White & Gold. However, it was not always the organizational powerhouse that it is today. Stemming from research that the Alumni Association conducted on alumni engagement, they found that students who were involved in organizations and activities outside of academics were more likely to have a strong connection to Georgia Tech, and stay involved long after graduation. That brought forth “a big idea,” as SAA founder Laura (Kitashima) Giglio, EE 10, MS ECE 11, called it: to create an organization that would be extremely easy for any student to join—from first-year student to PhD.

Flashback to the fall of 2008, when Giglio was a member of the Student Board of Trustees (SBoT) and Alumni Association Vice President Kara Petracek attended one of their meetings with the following challenge: to recruit members of the SBoT to serve as leaders and help represent the student perspective within the organization.

“John Hanson, IE 11, Brandon Monroe, CE 10, and I raised our hands to help with this initiative,” says Giglio. “We thought our role would be to attend a handful of meetings at the Alumni Association and provide our opinions.”

As the group produced more ideas that they felt the students would enjoy, the project grew to the point where they decided to launch a new organization.

“The main idea around SAA was to make it easier for students to interact with GT’s alumni,” Hanson says. “This should be through engaging programming that interests both parties.”

The group began creating the building blocks of what was to become SAA, researching what other universities were doing for student organizations and attending conferences. “That’s how some of the ‘big ideas’ that became—and are still part of—the pillars of the SAA came to be,” observes Giglio.

Despite the enthusiasm, creating SAA was not without its challenges, including gaining buy-in from existing organizations on campus. “We did this by giving presentations to other organizations to show them what we wanted to work with them on, especially if they had similar mentor programs or alumni programs. A lot of thought was put into making sure we had the most impactful programming possible before we went live.”

In the fall of 2010, the Georgia Tech Student Alumni Association was finally born. Though initially the team thought that getting student buy-in and participation would be an issue, the organization became the biggest group on campus overnight.

“We were hoping to register 500 members in the first semester, but we ended up registering over 600 the first day,” Giglio recalls. “I remember Kara [Petracek] being excited, but also being a little concerned because we had a members-only event that first evening after kick-off, and she had not planned to feed 600 students!”

However, according to Giglio, SAA had the support of the alumni community from the start. “I remember Al Trujillo, AE 81 [President, Georgia Tech Foundation], telling us, ‘If you need more money to feed all these new members, just let me know—I’m happy to donate!’ That was so awesome, knowing how much work we’d put into all the pre-planning, to have such a successful and notable alumnus be so willing to support us and be so generous.”

Though Hanson suspects the swag bags did help, the success of the initial sign-up was also a sign that they had gotten the program right. “It showed that we had done a good job with our diligence and marketed the benefits the SAA could provide students.”

From its infancy to its 10-year anniversary, the aim of SAA has always been connecting students with alumni from the first day they set foot on campus and showing them what engagement looks like as Yellow Jackets—even after graduation.