Welcome to the Centennial Connections series, celebrating the tremendous contributions that Graduate School alumni have made to knowledge in the service of society. Wherever expert researchers and creative scholars are needed, you can find Duke’s graduate alums.
We hope you already know about the Alumni Profiles series, which tells the individual stories of some of our school’s graduates. These are designed to serve as a complement to the career outcomes data that our school collects and publishes for master’s and Ph.D. alumni. The data visualizations published on the website are a wonderful way to better understand the fascinating variety of industries where our master’s graduates work, the progress through faculty ranks of Ph.D. graduates who choose a career in the academy, or where in the world our graduates wind up, to name just a few examples.
Through the Alumni Profiles series, you can already use filters to see stories of social sciences Ph.D. alumni who now work in nonprofits, identify engineers who have gone on to faculty careers, or find humanities graduates working in the private sector, for example.
Since the Professional Development Blog launched in 2014, we’ve published over 200 profiles. In the course of that effort, we’ve also noticed some themes that aren’t easy to capture with simple filters. As we pause to reflect on The Graduate School’s first hundred years, we found it a fitting time to pull together these themes as we celebrate. The Centennial Connections series brings together alumni stories from different eras, disciplines, professional paths, and backgrounds. We’ll share updates to the series each month throughout 2026.
If you’re a student wondering about the value of interviewing alumni for this series, you can read the perspectives of past authors and learn how to participate. If you’re a Graduate School alumna or alumnus and would like to be interviewed by a student for this series, reach out to Melissa Bostrom, Senior Assistant Dean for Graduate Student Professional Development, to express your interest.
Fittingly, this series was the brainchild of one of our alumni, Shu Hu, M.A.’24 (Liberal Studies). Thank you, Shu!