Meet Your Colleagues: Chelsea Avichayil

Meet Your Colleagues is a weekly feature highlighting employees who make a positive impact at UAA through their work every day. This week, we're featuring Chelsea Avichayil. For questions or to nominate someone for an upcoming feature, please contact University Relations at uaa_news@alaska.edu.

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Chelsea Avichayil

Alumni Outreach Specialist
Alumni Relations

How do you contribute to student success?
Working in Alumni Relations, I feel that my contribution to student success is somewhat secondhand. I have a part in organizing some events in which alumni connect directly with students, but I think the most profound contribution would have to be helping to raise up our incredibly talented and diverse alumni body. Making their stories heard is something that I think is highly compelling to students and potential students. They see our successful alumni and think, "That could be me. I can do this right here at UAA."

How long have you worked at UAA? Why did you decide to join UAA?
I started working for UAA in February 2016 when I was working on my bachelor's. I looked for work at UAA initially because I didn't want to commute back and forth between my full-time job and full-time classes at UAA. When I read the job description for an admin assistant in the alumni office, it sounded like a great fit for me. Over four years later, Alumni Relations is still my home.

What is the most common question you receive at work?
How do I get to "X"? is the most common question that we receive in the office since the main UAA address takes everyone to the Consortium Library building. It's a great conversation starter, and I've met a lot of students, alumni and more that way.

What do you enjoy most about working at UAA?
It's really great to see my ideas come to fruition. A benefit of working in a smaller department is that I have a voice and I get to see some of my ideas come to life. As an alumna myself, I feel that I bring a unique perspective to our department.

What do you consider your greatest accomplishment while working here at UAA?
I think one of my greatest accomplishments is working with our IT Services department so that alumni are able to keep their UAA emails when they leave. They weren't able to have that option before and it was something that the Alumni Relations tried to work on for a long time. I kept fighting for it until IT figured out a way to make it happen. This was also one of our most commonly asked questions.

What is your favorite Alaska activity?
My favorite Alaskan activity is seeing the unique beauty in the state. There's such a variety, and my family and I enjoy being "tourists" for a day and going camping.

Tell us a fun fact about yourself.
From elementary school through my first few years of college, I took private voice lessons where I was trained in everything from classical and musical to opera music.

September Archive