As seniors begin to wrap up the last few weeks of their time at the University of Notre Dame, Thursday night’s Home After Dome event offered a space where students could gain mentorship and connections with those who were previously in their shoes.
The Notre Dame Alumni Association hosted the third annual iteration of this event in Downes Club Ballroom in Corbett Family Hall, from 8:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. The occasion drew club presidents, regional directors and affinity group leaders from across the country and a handful from abroad to meet students before graduation.
Joey Murphy ’18, chair of YoungND and a representative on the Notre Dame Alumni Association Board, said that the concept was straightforward — give seniors a head start in knowing the alumni community before they leave campus.
“I remember as my time as a student, you don’t think about life after Notre Dame outside of a job too much,” Murphy said. “You don’t think about clubs or alumni. So many of us want to graduate and still feel the same attachment. The more we can do to introduce the alumni association with students, the better.”
The event ran alongside the Alumni Association Leadership Conference, an annual gathering that brings club leaders to campus for days of workshops. It functioned similar to a fair, with alumni stationed at tables representing their regional clubs and affinity groups.
Students were able to engage by collecting business cards and scanning QR codes for resources like IrishCompass, Notre Dame’s professional community network, while alumni offered city-specific relocation advice and merchandise from their home regions. A bingo card activity encouraged students to seek out new places, with completed cards entered into a raffle for prizes.
Tables represented clubs from major metropolitan areas including Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Nashville and the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as smaller regional chapters like the Notre Dame Club of Greater Hartford, located in Connecticut.
Tori Savino ’12, president of the Notre Dame Club of Greater Hartford, mentioned that the event gave her club an opportunity to reach students who might not have otherwise thought of central Connecticut as a destination for life postgrad.
“It’s kind of hard to know who’s gonna go where,” Savino said. “For us, as a smaller club, it’s always nice to come back to campus and meet people coming out that summer, whether they’re new to the area or returning home.”
Savino has attended the event for the past two years and runs a club that has expanded beyond standard game watches. They target alumni employed at companies like Pratt & Whitney and ESPN, contributing to a significant Notre Dame presence in Connecticut.
International presences were also scattered throughout the room, including the Club of France. Co-president Joana Abdou said getting Notre Dame students to even know the club exists is half the battle. Her daughter, Emma Abdou ’24, a club member as well, stood nearby and affirmed to the program’s reach.
“I just want them to know that it exists, that it has events, and that if someone is interested in France, there is a network they can connect to,” Emma Abdou said. The club has organized game watches, Thanksgiving and Fourth of July meals, picnics and internship networking for students studying or working abroad in Paris, along with students seeking summer positions there as well.
Geographic representation at the event remained limited. Notre Dame’s alumni body spans all 50 states and more than 100 countries, but the room skewed toward Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast clubs, with sparser coverage of the South and Mountain West.
Murphy did not detail specific plans by the association to subsidize travel for club leaders from farther out regions, though the leadership conference itself brings those leaders to campus. He acknowledged, however, the structural challenge of reaching students before they tune out.
According to Murphy, several attendees had secured jobs through connections made at past iterations of the event, though building that culture of alumni engagement typically starts with smaller engagements.
Christine Lynch ’10, Mid-Atlantic regional director of ND Women Connect, believed the event was just one piece of a broader push to reach students before graduation.
The night before the event, ND Women Connect had hosted a separate celebration on campus for outgoing undergraduate and graduate women. They held it for them to connect with alumnae and getting them excited about life after Notre Dame.
“As I’ve become more seasoned in life, staying connected has created meaningful relationships that are cross-generational,” Lynch said. “I felt like I had the ability to take all that opportunity and give back to others so they could have that same experience.”
Katherine Ellis, a senior global affairs and French major, said that the format allowed for the event to not be seen as an obligatory networking exercise. She added that the occasion had planted a seed she hadn’t expected — considering not just which city she was moving to, but whether she might eventually volunteer with an alumni club herself.
“One hundred percent,” she said. “I didn’t learn as much about volunteering with their clubs specifically, but about the events they do and how they build connections.”
Murphy said transition, from student to contributor to the Notre Dame community, is the deeper goal of the whole evening.
“I’m just trying to help them transition and make sure they feel connected to the University, even as they move away,” he said.
