Yahoo! Campus Relations Shows Its School Spirit
A small group of Yahoos are becoming familiar faces on key university campuses across the nation. Splashes of purple stand out in faculty offices and dormitories. Students engage in round-the-clock “Hack U” programming fests to claim recognition and prizes for their ability to develop their dream applications. University faculty members and thought leaders visit Yahoo! offices to share ideas through talks and discussions, eager to get their hands on real-world problems and collaborate with us on the challenges of the Internet industry.
These are just a few examples of how the Yahoo! Academic Relations (AR) team, led by Ron Brachman, is working with strategic universities around the world, creating partnerships of substance with both faculty and students. Within AR, the campus relations group focuses on individual schools, lending a personal, knowledgeable touch to our interactions with key campuses. It creates in-depth relationships that are unique to each school as well as facilitates the local execution of broader programs, such as Hack U, which are created and run by AR program managers.
“Keeping Yahoo!’s brand in front of students and faculty reinforces our value as a starting point on the Web,” says Ken Schmidt, who leads the campus relations team. “More than just providing Yahoo!-branded gifts, we are able to partner with Yahoo!’s product teams and business units to help market their products on campus, test new product ideas, and bring new concepts or startup ideas from campus labs to the company.” Prior to joining Yahoo!, Ken was an operations consultant for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he helped the director build a new cognitive systems program. Ken also worked at AT&T Research, where he led an internal incubator team to match research technologies to clients’ needs. Ken has engineering degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, and an MBA from New York University.
Ken points out that, aside from branding opportunities, the schools represent important sources of new talent, new ideas, and new science. As part of the overall Academic Relations program, the campus relations team comprises a small group of experts who act as “account managers” each responsible for a set of schools.
“I think it’s essential in our industry that we be plugged directly and deeply into the top universities in the world for the science and technology underlying what we do,” says Don McGillen, who is a senior campus relations manager for several schools on the East Coast and Midwest, including his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University. Don came to Yahoo! after spending nine years at Carnegie Mellon as the executive director of the university’s Cyber Laboratory (CyLab), a large research and education center for cyber security that involves over forty faculty members and 140 grad students from six different college-level units at Carnegie Mellon. “These campus relationships are key for the all-important areas where the technology and hard science intersect the social science aspect of what the Internet makes possible,” adds Don.
Today, the complexity and possibilities of the Web can neither be harnessed nor fully understood from the vantage point of a single academic discipline. Yahoo!’s interests in academia span many areas of thought, from computer science and engineering to economics to statistics to sociology. As a result, it is important for the Academic Relations team to reach out to schools with strengths in a variety of areas, as well as schools with strong interdisciplinary programs. On top of this, the company is eager to hire top-notch MBA’s, finance majors, and other non-technical experts.
“Our work with top business schools serves us by extending our basic research program, stimulating education and research in areas of importance to Yahoo’s future, and introducing our company and products to future Yahoo customers and employees,” says Beth Crow, campus relations manager. Beth has extensive experience in developing strategic partnerships between industry and higher education, having spent ten years directing corporate relations for the University of Pittsburgh and then Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper business school.
Melinda White completes the team as a campus manager. Melinda has worked at Yahoo! for four years, where she was most recently a lead technical recruiter. Prior to Yahoo!, she was a technical recruiter for Google and a recruiting manager at Sun Microsystems.
On each targeted campus, the campus relations team partners with the university recruiting team, led by Lindsey Duran, to form a campus team. A technical lead from Research or Engineering is included on this team. Campus teams support recruiting events, sponsor technical talks, bring programs like Hack Day to campuses, and reach out to alumni working at Yahoo! to help spread a little purple around the schools.
“After less than one year we’ve accomplished so much, and Yahoo!’s brand is more visible as a result,” notes Ken. “But while we’ve seen significant interest and have been successful on several campuses, we are always on the lookout for more opportunities to improve our recruiting, scientific collaboration and presence/brand recognition on campus.”
The team is continuously evaluating its efforts, identifying competitive programs, looking for new opportunities, and developing program enhancements that will enable Yahoo! to become the partner of choice among the academic community.
A quick overview of the scope of the Academic Relations program can be found at http://research.yahoo.com/Academic_Relations.
