Hello Summer Search community!

Eric Trinh Chu here (Bay Area alum ‘13, current Summer Search Alumni Ambassador and Development Operations Associate) with an update on a sweet milestone we recently reached: 100 alumni interviews completed! 

It’s been my great delight to bear witness to alumni stories from the past 35 years of Summer Search programming as Summer Search’s inaugural Alumni Ambassador. Alumni Director, Seth Ellis, and I established the following goals for this project:

1. To gather feedback to improve Summer Search’s program quality
2. To re-engage and reconnect with alumni who have fallen out of touch
3. To explore how we can foster ongoing collaboration between alumni and the staff and students of Summer Search today

The most surprising theme I found after speaking to over 100 alumni? Whether fresh out of high school or deep in our careers, we’re all still figuring it out – we’re all still engaged in the search! When looking back on the space for self-inquiry and reflection that their mentors created, many alumni expressed a desire for similar opportunities to pause, reflect, and reconnect with their sense of purpose today. Whether it’s traveling more, starting a family or businesses, returning to the outdoors, or taking an entirely new direction in life, Summer Searchers still have a deep sense of curiosity towards what makes life meaningful, as well as a willingness to face ambiguity with hope and resilience.

Summer Search alums are starting nonprofits, running for local government, building lives around creative passions, changing careers, caring for family, healing from burnout, and so much more. Summer Search alums do not always remember what they talked about or worked on with their mentors. Sometimes they do not even remember their mentors’ names. But even when they don’t remember these details, they still remember the way their mentors made them feel: heard, understood, and allowed to exist in a way that is rare and valuable during adolescence.

Summer Searchers also have very different ways of conceptualizing challenges that happened during their program years. For example, some alumni said that switching mentors was challenging and frustrating, while others said that these transitions were helpful in developing their response to change.

As a fellow alum, I’ve been so blessed to commiserate with my fellow alumni about the trials and tribulations of growing up low-income. It has been an honor to celebrate your great news, laugh at your hilarious trip stories, bear witness to your sorrows, and admire your enduring dreams. I’ve been able to share my own new perspectives as a staff member at Summer Search. We are an organization that remains as big-hearted and values-driven as when I was a program participant, but that has grown more trauma-informed and supportive of pathways to adult success outside of college in response to the needs of the current youth we serve. And we’re an organization that will continue to adapt to new challenges in the years ahead.

It’s been a true honor and my great pleasure, and I hope to sit down with and talk to many more alumni in the months to come. I am energized by you all to continue to work alongside Seth and other Summer Search staff – some of whom have been with Summer Search since I was a program participant half my life ago – to grow our programs and alumni community. 

Fellow alums, look out for me in your email and phone inboxes! May we continue to grow together. 

With great abiding warmth,
Eric Trinh Chu