The unOffical CTY Alumni Association: Work In Progress

NOTE: I am no longer working on the uOCTYAA. I have some other projects and ideas at this point, and hopefully, I'll update this page before the earth crashes into the sun.

The idea of an unoffical, student run alumni association first started being tossed around the CTY-L list in the summer of 1999. Despite much discussion and lots of plans, it has yet to really get off the ground. In the next couple of months, I'm going to be working to set up at least parts of the association, and see where it goes from there. The following webpage is a compilation of various e-mails I've written about the organization, and gives a pretty good idea of what I would like to see happen.

There are several things that I feel that the official CTY Alumni Association should be doing that it isn't doing. I have been talking to Holly on and off for the past year and a half, and the entire time she has promised that things will get better soon. At this point, I am slightly doubtful... however, if improvements are actual made the official alumni association, we will most likely need to rethink our purpose and such. For the moment, however, I feel that the purpose of the uOCTYAA is to do some of the things that the official association should be doing, but isn't.

I figure I should let you know where I'm coming from. My nomore year was in 1997, three years ago. I have a rather busy life outside of CTY... I have a full time job as a secretary for a lobbiest, I have a boyfriend who I've been dating for the past year. I have my own apartment, and I hope to go back to school real soon.

My eventual goal is to go into Gifted Education, specifically as a psychologist studying the mental and emotional effects of being gifted in today's society and discovering if there is any corolation between high intelligence and emotional problems, and if so what can be done about it, and also providing counseling to gifted students. CTY is a good starting place for this, I think.

I also think there are flaws in the program, which need to be fixed. I think a lot of the problem has to do with lack of community and communication. CTY, in a sense, is one big community divided into a lot of little communities. There are at least 15 separate mailing lists, and at least 50 webpages that I've found. There are probably hundreds of little groups of CTY friends, each with their own community and complaints. All of them have at least some problems with the program, usually with the administration. I've been monitoring a couple of these groups for a couple of years now, and I'm close friends with people in a one or two of them. A lot of the complaints are the same. However, because the groups are small and isolated, no one know that everyone has the same complaints, that people have been complaining about this for years. And no one knows how to get the Administration to listen.

Basically, if we can get a large enough group of people together, than we stand a better chance. If we could create some sort of organization, it might help in getting problems with the program fixed, at the same time providing cool services for those who are too old to go to CTY.

The five things that I would like the see the uOCTYAA do are outlined below:

As the webpage is probably the most important part of this project, I'm going to outline briefly what I would like to see. Much of what I currently have on my page would move to the uOCTYAA page, as well as content created by other CTYers working on the site.

After some discussion, I think the best way to get things rolling is to get people to volunteer to work on various parts of the project.

Here are a list of jobs which I think need to be done; if people have any comments or questions, or would like to volunteer to work on something, they should mail me at elizaweb@bigfoot.com.

If you are interested in helping out with the uOCTYAA, you can e-mail me at elizaweb@bigfoot.com