For most alumni, thinking about their university immediately conjures images of favorite haunts and hangouts, peers and professors, all mingling in the mind's eye. And the setting is probably on campus.

Put the Bearcat in your circle There are 8,000-plus Bearcats active on inCircle -- and then there is the Bearcat. UC's famous mascot has his own personal inCircle network, blog and other special information to share with his fellow members of the UC family. To join his network, register on inCircle, type "the Bearcat" in the search bar, pull up the Bearcat's profile and click on the "Add as a friend" button.

It's true; nothing beats a trip back to the old stomping grounds. Yet for a growing number of Bearcats, their ongoing UC "sense of place" is also online. Indeed, thousands of alumni (as well as some students) are populating UC's online community, inCircle, to network socially and professionally.

"It needs to be easy to engage with your university and interact with each other as alumni," says Jennifer Heisey, A&S '97, the University of Cincinnati Alumni Associa-tion's senior director of alumni outreach. "Given how people communicate these days, a user-friendly online community is an important service, and we're pleased to offer the best available platform to all UC alumni."

Introduced three years ago by the UC Alumni Association as a free benefit to all UC grads, inCircle is a versatile networking tool that has steadily added new features and active participants. Because social networks grow "virally," each addition makes the service inherently stronger with more compelling opportunities.

Here's how inCircle works:

• When a UC alum registers on inCircle, the first step is to create a personal profile, including only the information that he or she chooses to share. Entering specific data in the profile will naturally point the alum toward groups of fellow alumni who have things in common -- where they live, their professional fields, their college and student organizations while at UC, their special interests now, etc.
• Alumni invite each other to become "friends" on the network. As these circles of friends expand and overlap, new connections within the vast UC alumni community become evident. How they are leveraged is up to each participating alum, but the process taps into people's natural tendency to gravitate toward those with shared experiences.
• New features and value-adds are built into inCircle continually, so alumni can easily find job postings, upcoming events, news from UC and their friends, blogs and photos, discussion groups and more.

"Because professional networking is an often-stated, ongoing need of alumni, inCircle's powerful career development module is very highly valued," Heisey says. "Hundreds of jobs are posted on inCircle by companies that are interested in hiring from the UC family. In fact, many businesses are run by, or hiring decisions made by, UC alumni who know they'll find excellent people within the Bearcat network.

"And, of course, many jobs are filled simply through our personal networks, or 'circles.'"

Another feature of inCircle is free e-mail forwarding in which alumni can create personalized, UC alumni-branded e-mail addresses that will instantly route e-mail to any ISP-based address they choose. "It's a great option when you want to emphasize your education and UC affiliation," Heisey says.

"It also brings some permanence to your e-mail address. People will always be able to reach you via your UC alumni e-mail."

Groups of UC alumni are constantly networking on inCircle. Each is essentially a virtual community of Bearcats built around what their members have in common -- involvement in student clubs or organizations, careers in certain fields or industries, geographic locations, fraternities or sororities, academic and honorary organizations, hobbies, interests or any common thread that ties varied UC alumni together.

That means discussion is always humming on inCircle because there are so many of these common-interest groups -- more than 225 and rising. After all, when someone doesn't find exactly what they're looking for, they can start a new group. That's how they all started anyway.

Here's just a small sample of the interest groups active on inCircle:
UC Entrepreneurs
Sigma Sigma
College of Business Accounting Alumni
Bearcats in the Big Apple
African American Alumni
Engineering Tribunal
UC on YouTube
Bearcat Football Fans
UC Worldwide Travelers
Motorcycle Enthusiasts
Central Ohio Alumni
Poets
UC Bearcat Bands
Young Alumni
Sell to and Buy from China
UC Alumni Recruitment Team (UCART)

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