NYC-based Watson School advisory board unites alumni

After earning their degrees at Binghamton University, graduates disperse all around the world in pursuit of jobs that best utilize the skills they learned.

As you might expect, many Watson School alumni feel the pull of the New York City area, with its myriad opportunities for employment — but until the last few years, there was little effort to organize and harness the collective power that stronger networking provides.

The Watson School’s newly launched New York metro alumni advisory board looks to tap into that potential.

Director of Development Alan Greene ’88 came up with the idea in late 2017 to start contacting alumni located in or near New York City, and a key recruit was Joseph Pedone ’92, the global head of production management and infrastructure for J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management, a division of JPMorgan Chase.

Even though he had graduated nearly 25 years earlier, Pedone — who majored in computer science — had few interactions with the Watson School in the interim. In fact, the majority of coworkers he knew who went to Binghamton were alumni from the School of Management.

“I was blown away by the fact that someone had reached out to me and wanted to chat, to hear about my experiences after graduation,” he says.

Wanting to give back to the school and find shared experiences with others, Pedone sought to grow the alumni network and also began reaching out to fellow graduates.

“We did a poll of the local alumni who registered themselves as working in the New York metro area, and that’s when we started talking to people,” he says. “We had a couple of meetings, threw some ideas out there and then started to see if there was interest.”

The metro advisory board held its first meeting in April 2018, and quarterly meetings proved successful enough that the board officially adopted bylaws in March 2019. Among its 14 members – with Pedone serving as chair - are employees from prestigious companies such as Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg and McGraw-Hill Education.

Pedone sees three main goals for the advisory board: fundraising, growing the alumni network, and helping Binghamton University students with placements either as interns or full-time employees. In summer 2019, he hosted a get-together at a rooftop bar in Manhattan for J.P. Morgan employees who graduated from Binghamton University. Among the guests was Watson School Dean Krishnaswami “Hari” Srihari, who provided an update on the latest research and initiatives.

Like Pedone, most of the attendees were part of the company’s information technology sector in the firm’s New York and New Jersey offices. Because the company is so large — with more than 250,000 employees worldwide and 50,000 in IT alone — he met some of the coworkers for the first time.

“We share this common experience and common culture where we grew up and learned,” Pedone says. “It’s made us better employees, and working together to help the University is going to strengthen those bonds. It’s a win for J.P. Morgan and it’s a win for Binghamton.”

He hopes to run similar events in other regions where Binghamton University graduates have a strong presence, such as Dallas, Texas; Silicon Valley; and India. Along the way, he will spread word about the importance of donating to Watson School programs, research, student competition teams and more.

“We want to help achieve certain financial goals for the institution, and we work very closely with the dean about where the need is the greatest for the school,” Pedone says.

“There’s a very low rate of alumni giving for Watson School graduates. If we could increase the contributions and get more people giving, that’s going to raise the bar.”