In 2019 MA Power, Participation & Social Change (MAP) students completed a group project on ‘Life After IDS’ which came up with a series of recommendations for IDS on how to build an effective alumni network. One of the recommendations was to connect one student to one alum through a postcard written by current MAP students for the incoming batch. 2019 starters in MAP should have received one of these postcards. We are expanding this idea to cover all new master’s students in 2020. Due to COVID-19 we have moved to a virtual platform through a third party called PostSnap. The process is easy, and we’ve created these Virtual Postcard Instructions to help you with your postcard.

We are looking forward to passing on your messages of support and encouragement as well as to send some tips for success for new students.

Start by clicking this link to your free postcard
 

We want you to write a message for a new student starting at IDS to help give them a sense of belonging to the IDS community – this could be a general message of support and encouragement as well as practical information or tips for success based on your experiences at IDS.

When writing your message, you might think it useful to think about when you started as a student at IDS, what would you have found useful to know in those first weeks?  What message of support or practical information would have been useful to hear in those first few weeks? Feel free to add your contact information to the card but please be mindful of the fact that anyone could see the card and we might (depending on resources) share a few messages with the wider IDS Community, on the website or social media. Please note that we will ask for your permission before we share online. Our main objective is to give one postcard to each incoming student at the beginning of the new academic year (2020-2021).

See these step-by step instructions, it’s free, and as mentioned above we may ask for your permission to share your postcard with the wider community (online via social media and websites) but will not do this without your permission.

Once we have collected enough messages, we will ask PostSnap to print them all and post them to us in time for handing out to new students at the end of September 2020.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for improvements please email the Alumni Relations Office (alumni@ids.ac.uk)