The “Y” in YPN Does Not Mean What You Think It Means

Written By: Ernesto Crucet

Go ahead. I know what you are thinking. You saw “Young Professionals Network” and immediately did one of two things. Either you thought, “Oh, that is not for me, I have been doing this for fifteen years,” and kept scrolling. Or you thought, “I am definitely too old for that,” and kept scrolling. Either way, you kept scrolling. I am here to ask you very nicely to scroll back up.

Because here is the thing about the Y in YPN, it has absolutely nothing to do with your age. Nothing. Zero. Nada. Niente. We are not checking IDs at the door, and there is no age bracket on the membership form. Nobody is going to ask you when you graduated or quietly calculate how long ago that was based on the year on your LinkedIn profile. That is not what we are about. What we are actually about is newness. And newness, as it turns out, has no age limit whatsoever.

Are you new to higher education? Welcome! You probably came from somewhere completely different and are still figuring out why everything takes three committee approvals and a six-week lead time. We get it. Pull up a chair. Are you new to HEUG? Also, welcome! It is a big community with a lot of history and a lot of acronyms, and finding your footing here can feel a little like walking into a party where everyone else seems to know each other already. I have been there too, kind of still am a little bit. Did you just step into a new role, a new department, or a new institution? Congratulations and may the coffee be ever in your favor, because starting over is both exciting and quietly terrifying, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably just three raccoons in a trench coat. The good news is you have a space in HEUG now.

Maybe you have been in higher ed for twenty years but just started working with a new system, a new team, or in a new area entirely. Guess what? You are new to something, and that counts. The YPN is your on-ramp. The whole point of this network is to create a space where being new to something is not a weakness to hide or an awkward thing to explain. It is literally the price of admission. We built this because so many of us spent years wishing there had been somewhere to land when we were figuring things out, a place to ask the questions we were too embarrassed to ask in a full conference session, and to find someone a few steps ahead willing to say, “Here is what I actually wish I had known.”

So whether you are 25 or 55, brand new to the field or just brand new to this corner of it, the Y in YPN is yours!