Alumni, career & mentorship.

A graduate is the school's longest-running proof of work. Most institutions lose them to a spreadsheet that goes stale within a year. YESS keeps them in a living network: reachable, mentoring, hiring, giving — and recognised for it. The module has two faces, and this handbook treats both: the graduate's own portal, and the school's administration of it.

The graduate's home is /alumni; the school runs the programme from /dashboard/alumni. What ties them together is a contribution engine — every donation, mentorship session, posted opportunity, and published story earns experience points that lift the graduate's mentor level and unlock badges.

A new graduate is welcomed by an eight-step setup wizard at /alumni/welcome — career, education, location, mentorship availability, marketplace interest, and privacy, each step skippable. Completing it marks the profile complete and opens the full portal.

The home screen at /alumni shows a community pulse (total alumni, active opportunities, upcoming events, total donations) and the graduate's own impact (impact score, mentorship hours, opportunities posted, donations made), plus their recent mentorships and the next few events. The directory at /alumni/directory is a searchable roster of the whole alumni body — filter by industry, class year, field of study, city, and mentorship availability — each card showing role, company, location, a “Class of” year, and a mentor-level badge once the graduate has earned enough impact.

The full profile at /alumni/profile carries the career and education detail, the mentorship toggle and capacity, an achievements panel (level, XP, progress to the next level, rank, earned badges), an internship history with supervisor evaluations, and a profile-visibility setting — public, school-only, or private — that governs who can see the record.

A graduate who is available to mentor flips a toggle on their profile and sets a capacity. A student then sends a request, which arrives in the mentor's queue at /alumni/mentorship carrying the mentee's goals, focus areas, and a match score shown as a percentage. The mentor accepts or declines; an accepted request becomes an active match (the match itself moves through pending, accepted, active, and completed, or is declined or cancelled).

From there the pairing runs on sessions — each scheduled with a time and a duration, then marked completed, cancelled, or no-show. The match tracks total sessions and hours; on completion the mentee rates the mentor one to five and leaves feedback, and the match closes as completed. The mentor dashboard sorts everything into Pending requests, Active, and Completed, over headline figures for total mentorships, active matches, total hours, and average rating.

Meaningful contributions earn experience points, written to an append-only XP ledger that lifts the graduate's impact score. Four kinds are tracked automatically: a completed donation (one point per ten given), a posted opportunity (25 points), a mentorship completed (50 points plus ten per hour mentored) or a session held (15 points), and a published success story (75 points). Two further event types — an event hosted and a guest lecture given — are recognised through a manual award the school records, alongside any other off-platform contribution it wishes to credit. Eight event types in all.

Impact score drives a mentor level on a widening curve: level one runs from zero, level two opens at 100 points, level three at 400, level four at 900, level five at 1600 — and the curve keeps widening without a cap, so a high level genuinely signals sustained contribution. Alongside levels sit badges, drawn from a school-managed catalogue with four rarities — common, rare, epic, and legendary. A badge is earned manually, at an XP threshold, or after a count (or sum) of a particular kind of contribution, and it is awarded the instant the threshold is crossed.

The graduate sees their standing on the achievements panel of their profile and on the leaderboard; the school manages the whole system at /dashboard/alumni/gamification — the badge catalogue (with icon, rarity, and criteria), the top-ten leaderboard, the recent-XP feed, and a per-alumnus Award XP dialog for recognising contributions the engine cannot see automatically.

A graduate posts a role at /alumni/opportunities — a job, internship, scholarship, networking offer, guest lecture, research position, or volunteer brief — with a company, a description, a location, a salary or scholarship amount, and a deadline. An internship opportunity can be bridged to the marketplace, which finds or creates the partner company and drops the posting into the YESS internship pipeline current students apply through.

Reunions, networking nights, career fairs, guest lectures, workshops, and fundraisers live at /alumni/events — in-person, virtual, or hybrid, with capacity, free or paid ticketing, and one-tap RSVP that tracks who registered and who attended. And the giving page at /alumni/giving lets a graduate donate to a purpose (general fund, scholarship, infrastructure, library, and more), apply to scholarships, track their own giving history with receipts, and see the donor leaderboard.

The school runs the programme from /dashboard/alumni, whose home shows the vital stats — total alumni, active mentors, active opportunities, upcoming events, badges awarded, total XP — and reaches eight management surfaces: the /dashboard/alumni/directory (roster and mentor flagging), mentorship oversight, event creation and publishing, the success-story review queue (stories move from pending review to published), the gamification console, the analytics surface, and the moderated /dashboard/alumni/forums.

The analytics surface at /dashboard/alumni/analytics turns the network into intelligence: the mentor rate, industry and geographic distribution, top employers, alumni by graduation year, and the spread of mentor levels across the body. The public-facing directory at /portal/alumni lets current families browse alumni and find mentors, with a mentors-only filter and each graduate's impact and mentorship hours on show.

Alumni reaches back into the school it came from and forward into the careers of the students still in it.