Q. You come from a UH family.

A. My father received a certificate in carpentry from Honolulu Technical College, the current site of Honolulu Community College. My sister, Marya, graduated from UH with a bachelor's in arts and drama. My brother, Keenan, has a degree in fine arts from UH. He alternates doing the announcements for Warrior football games at Aloha Stadium and does the P.A. announcements for the UH Rainbow baseball games. My mother, Naomi, is a two-time UH graduate. She received a B.A. in English and a master's degree in education, both from UH-Manoa. She was a teacher at Waipahu High School for 20 years in English and vice principal at Kanoelani Elementary School in Waipi'o Gentry and became the principal at Ilima Intermediate in 'Ewa Beach. She now is the personnel officer for the Leeward District in Kapolei and recruits teachers for the schools out in the Leeward side.

Q. How did you go from studying journalism/PR at UH to working in foundation/alumni work at Harvard?

A. Like a lot of things, it was a mistake. At UH, they participate in this great national student exchange program and I went to UMass Amherst. After graduation, I returned to Boston and worked for a few years in Cambridge at a medical lab doing patient billing work and customer service and thought I'd take a look across the river to Harvard to obtain a master's degree in something. A couple of friends there said, "If you work here, you get a big tuition break." I applied to several places at Harvard and ended up at the Harvard Development and Alumni Affairs office. They liked the fact that I worked as an undergrad at the UH bookstore, the board of publications at UH, with the ASUH senate as a publicist and kept the stats for the Wahine softball team for a semester.

Q. What was your first job at Harvard?

A. My boss at the Alumni Association of Harvard threw a few travel brochures on the table and said, "We run the alumni travel program and you'll have to help me manage these trips." They were alumni tours abroad to Greece on yachts, travels through India on trains. My job was to coordinate with tour operators to put together thematic trips to places like Turkey and China and give them an academic focus. My job was also to recruit the relevant Harvard faculty to accompany these groups of alumni. I traveled to nearly 40 countries in a six-, seven-year period, usually very high end with a nice strong learning component. I was a Pearl City boy who felt pretty lucky. I was able to take my mom to China and the British Isles. I took my wife and child to England and Alaska's inside passage, took my grandfather to France, took my brother on a train journey from Zimbabwe to Cape Town through the heart of South Africa and so forth. UH offered me my current job in 2003, just as I was promoted to being the director of the travel program at Harvard after 10 years of working up from admin assistant.

Q. So when you finally got to throw travel brochures on the new kid's desk, you ended up coming back home?

A. Exactly. I could have stayed in Harvard and traveled the world but UH's program was in the beginning phases and I felt it was a challenge I ought to take.

Q. The UH Alumni Association has 40 chartered chapters, 25 of them in Hawai'i.

A. Each campus has an individual chapter, UH-Hilo, Hawai'i Community College, UH-West O'ahu, Kapi'olani Community College. Only Manoa, so far, is broken down into units: The College of Business, College of Education, nursing and so on. Over the last year we've doubled our membership, from 2,800 total dues-paying members on July 1, 2005 to 5,400 dues paying members at the end of June '06.

Dues start at $50 per person for an annual membership and $60 for a joint, husband-wife membership. In many cases only one person is an actual degree-holding alumni. We also offer a $25, or half-priced, membership for anybody who graduated from any part of the UH system five years ago or less. Any faculty, staff anywhere in the UH system can also join for that $25 price, even if they didn't graduate. We're basically an alumni and friends association.

Membership provides a means of financial support for the university. But members can join the University Federal Credit Union, get discounts on auto insurance, discounts for various restaurants, discounts for graduate school tests. For instance a young alum who pays a $25 membership can get a $75 discount on a graduate testing course and receive an immediate benefit. Since our reach has grown in the last year, more benefit partners are coming to us.

Q. But alumni membership means more than restaurant discounts.

A. We did a survey and the two most valuable things alumni want are career development and lifelong learning. We created a career services portion of our web site — www.uhalum ni.hawaii.edu — that lets employers who are UH graduates post job openings while job candidates can post their resumes. UH alumni can also choose to become mentors for younger UH alumni.

Q. While you've doubled membership, there are far many more UH alumni who don't belong to the association.

A. We have about 200,000 alumni across all 10 campuses. Of those 200,000, about 140,000 live in Hawai'i, about 70 percent of our alumni base. We have 35,000 to 40,000 Mainland alumni and close to 10,000 internationally, mostly in Asia.

Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com.