Message from the Alumni Chair, GRSP
By: Sylvia Shortt, Alumni Committee Chair, GSRP
Welcome to the new GRSP newsletter! I am Sylvia Shortt, GRSP Alumni Committee Chair and also a current GRSP Trustee from the Athens area. I attended Brown University for my undergraduate degree in Psychology and University of West Georgia for a Masters and Ed.S. degree in Counseling. I am a Licensed Professional Counselor and remained at University of West Georgia to work in the counseling center after my degree was complete. I was there one year when I was asked to take on the International Student Program. At the time, we had 18 students, 14 of which were Rotary. I fell in love with the program and that became my primary job at the university. I was able to expand the program to 180 international students in my time there.
I worked at the University of West Georgia for 31 years in charge of the International Student Program and as a Counselor. I had many, many GRSP students under my care which was certainly one of the highlights of my job! I am still in touch with most of them. I retired from the University of West Georgia in 2012 and volunteered to be the alumni coordinator for the university. We have had 7 reunions since 2002 and always have GRSP alumni either attending our reunions or taking charge to help plan the
reunion.
I am very excited to be the first Alumni Chair for GRSP. I have all kinds of ideas for the future. We are starting with a couple of things. We have the Newsletter, which we plan to publish 3–4 times a year. We encourage you to submit articles about yourselves and have guidelines for any who are interested. There is a GRSP Alumni group on Facebook and also a listserv that I hope to have everyone on eventually. We also have an alumni survey that has gone out to both places that we need to have everyone fill out. We need a database of all GRSP alumni and that is the purpose of the survey. We very much want to stay in touch with all of you!
I am still trying to identify alumni from every country to be the liaison for that country. I have several volunteers already. We need alumni to help us recruit new GRSP applicants. Go to the clubs in your area and do a presentation if you can. We especially need help from countries that have stopped sending students. We would like a population full of diversity and representative of the world. If you would like to help us out, let me know.
We also hope to have reunions at some point. It would be nice to have a reunion in Europe where many of you are located, but we are certainly open to other locations. It is always nice to have you come back
to a reunion in the USA so hopefully that will happen in the future as well. We will have to see what transpires with COVID-19 before we plan further.
I am very grateful to the newsletter team for putting together this newsletter. Nipuna Ambanpola and Geeth Mahagamage helped me conceptualize it from the beginning and have done most of the work so I
thank them profusely as well as the rest of the team! If you have any questions or comments or suggestions, please feel free to email me at sshortt@westga.edu.
