Alumni

When a student finishes their program they don't disappear from the seminary's life — they become part of its network. The Alumni module keeps a lasting record of every graduate, lets graduates maintain their own contact and professional details, and offers an opt-in directory so alumni can find one another. It is deliberately light: graduates manage most of their own information from the portal, and staff only step in to admit someone to the alumni rolls or to keep the data honest.

Overview

The module is built around a single record, the Alumni Profile, plus the Alumni role that unlocks the alumni area of the portal.

Program Enrollment (graduated)  --Mark as Alumni-->  Alumni Profile  +  Alumni role
                                                          │
                                                          ├─ the graduate edits their own profile
                                                          └─ opt-in entry in the alumni directory

• An Alumni Profile holds who the graduate is, what they completed, where they are now, and how to reach them.
• The Alumni role is granted automatically when a profile is created. It is what gives the graduate access to the Alumni menu on the portal.

Becoming an alumnus

There are two ways a profile comes into being.

From a graduating student (the normal path)

Staff (Registrar, Program Chair, or Seminary Manager) open the student's Program Enrollment and choose Mark as Alumni. The system only allows this when:

• the Program Enrollment is submitted,
• the program is not an ongoing program (ongoing programs never transition to alumni status), and
• the student is graduation-eligible according to the Program Audit.

When those hold, a profile is created automatically — the graduate's name and a Graduations row carrying the program, the originating enrollment and the class year (derived from the academic year's end, so an autumn graduate of 2017–2018 is Class of 2018) are filled in for you, and the graduate receives the Alumni role. Each person has one profile; marking an already-converted student again adds a row for the new degree rather than creating a second profile.

Honorary, transfer, or board members (manual)

Not every alumnus comes through a graduation. To add an honorary graduate, a board member, or someone whose study predates the system, create an Alumni Profile by hand. The only requirement is a linked User account — that is what ties the profile to a login and lets the person manage it on the portal.

The alumni profile

A profile is organized into a few simple sections:

• Identity — name, email (kept in sync with the linked User), the original Student record if there is one, a photo, and two switches: Enabled and Show in Directory.
• Academic — one Graduations row per completed program, each with its program, academic year, class year and the enrollment it came from. A second degree adds a row; it does not replace the first.
• Professional — current role, organization, an optional link to a Partner Organization the seminary already knows, and LinkedIn.
• Mailing address and a free-text Bio.

Two flags govern visibility, and both must be on for a profile to appear in the directory:

Flag	Meaning
Enabled	The profile is active. Turn it off to retire a record without deleting it.
Show in Directory	The graduate has chosen to be listed. Graduates control this themselves from the portal.

A third switch, Open to Cohort Invitations, is narrower: it leaves the graduate listed but keeps other alumni from inviting them into a community cohort from the portal. Staff can still place them in one.

What the graduate sees on the portal

Once they have the Alumni role, graduates see an Alumni entry in the portal menu. From there they can:

• Edit their own profile — name, current role and organization, LinkedIn, city, country, bio, whether they appear in the directory, and whether other alumni may invite them into a cohort. (Academic facts like program and class year are set by the seminary and are not self-editable.)
• Search the directory — browse fellow alumni by name, role, organization or city, filter by program and by a range of class years, and page through the results.
• Open a profile to read someone's bio, see their graduations, and reach them: a directory profile shows the contact addresses that person chose to share (from Preferences — one address at a time, and only once confirmed), and offers to send them a message through the portal when the seminary has enabled alumni-to-alumni messaging. Replies arrive in the sender's Inbox. A message never discloses the sender's own address, only their name.

The directory only ever shows profiles that are both Enabled and Show in Directory, so a graduate who would rather stay private simply leaves the directory switch off. Directory access itself requires the Alumni role — it is not public.

Day-to-day for staff

Task	Where
Admit a graduating student to the alumni rolls	Program Enrollment → Mark as Alumni
Add an honorary / board / pre-system alumnus	New Alumni Profile with a linked User
Retire a record without deleting it	Untick Enabled on the profile
Remove someone from the directory	Untick Show in Directory (or ask them to)
Correct a graduate's academic details	Edit the Alumni Profile directly

Related

• Graduation Request — the step that confirms a student has actually graduated.
• Programs — where "ongoing" programs (which never transition to alumni) are defined.
• User Roles — what the Alumni role can and cannot do.