Making best use of alumni associations for holistic development of engineering institutes

Nostalgic feelings are very common in human beings. Nostalgic notions have been the main source of many creative works in the field of literature, art and other forms of mass communication. However the `potential of nostalgia´ has not yet been manifested in the field of technology and engineering, especially in the engineering education domain. Based on personal experiences and some specific incidents, the author proposes a novel idea of capitalizing the `nostalgia of alumni´ of engineering institutions for their holistic development. The paper presents the implementation of the proposed idea through a set of working examples in a teaching department of Cochin University of Science and Technology, namely, Department of Ship Technology, which is the Alma-mater and current office of the author. Various types of activities of the Alumni of the department have been compiled in a systematic way and formed into a `Role Model´ of Institution - Alumni relation entity.