A little while ago I started the Working Professional MBA program at The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business. If you're not familiar with it, the WP MBA is the part-time program built for people who keep their full-time jobs while they earn the degree — so my classmates are nurses, engineers, founders, marketers, and operators, all squeezing graduate school in around real careers and, in a lot of cases, families.
Not long after I joined, I was elected to our Student Council — and I took on the role of leading alumni outreach. The job, in plain terms: help current students stay connected to the people who've already been through the program. Mentorship. Advice. Introductions. Community.
One of the first things I noticed? We didn't really have a home online. A council, hundreds of students, a great program — and no simple place that said who we are and what we do.
So I did the thing I keep doing lately. I built one.
If you've read any of my other posts, you know the pattern by now. I'm not a developer. I've never taken a coding class. But over the last few months I've used Claude Code to build a website for my mom's law practice, one for my brother's film photography, an app or two, and this very site. Every time, the formula is the same: I know what I want, I describe it clearly, and the AI does the heavy lifting.
This time I sat down and described what our council needed: a clean, fast, professional page for the Ohio State Fisher Working Professional MBA Student Council. Somewhere to introduce the council, list our officers, share events, and give both students and alumni a reason to lean in. I wanted it to look official — because it represents real people doing real work.
The result lives right here on my site, in its own corner: josephalotozo.com/wpmba/.
Visit the WPMBA Council page →
Same as every other project, building the page was only half of it. A site nobody can find isn't doing anyone any good. So I went further:
llms.txt file — a plain-language summary written specifically for AI crawlers, so that when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about the WP MBA program, there's accurate, current information for it to draw from.All of it built by me and Claude Code in an afternoon. No agency. No budget. No waiting on a committee.
Here's the part I didn't fully appreciate until I started the role. Alumni outreach isn't really about a list of email addresses. It's about giving people a reason — and a place — to connect.
A real web presence does a few quiet but important things. It makes the council look organized and legitimate when I reach out to the university's alumni team. It gives me somewhere to host events and sign-ups down the road. And it creates a stage to spotlight the people in our program who are building genuinely cool things — because plenty of my classmates are launching ventures, and a little visibility can go a long way.
The best person to build something for a community isn't always the one with the most technical skill. Sometimes it's just the person willing to start.
I'm still early in this role, and I've got a lot to learn about doing alumni outreach the right way. But it felt good to start with something concrete — to show up to the work with a thing already built instead of just a list of ideas.
If you're part of a group that doesn't have a home online — a club, a council, a small nonprofit, a team — you might be surprised how far you can get in an afternoon. You don't need to know how to code. You just need to know what to ask for.
The genie is still listening.
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