Berklee Connect Unlocks the Power of a Global Network
Katie Vitolins, vice president of alumni services and Berklee Connect, introduces Conor Heaney BM ’23 to the new platform at Berklee’s Homecoming Alumni Brunch.
Mike Spencer
One day, professors and classmates are everywhere: people to ask for advice, musicians to play with, collaborators down the hall.
Then, suddenly, a new graduate might be off to Los Angeles or New York, trying to find their footing in the professional world.
Berklee’s community includes 90,000 alumni in 157 countries who can help. Now, they’re all a click away.
The newly launched Berklee Connect is a network and suite of career tools designed for all students, alumni, faculty, and staff. The platform places professional resources, mentoring, alumni events, networking, and exclusive benefits and discounts into one destination.
A searchable directory and map let users form connections by location, work experience, or area of expertise, turning a job search into a warm introduction.
And, for those seeking one-on-one career advice, there’s Soundboard. Consider it mentorship without a months-long commitment. A student or alum submits a question, and Berklee Connect matches that person with a mentor. The question might be enormous: How do I negotiate a contract? Or it might be specific: I’m moving to Nashville. Where can I find a bandmate? The goal is for relationships to flourish beyond the platform, sustained by a singularly supportive artistic community.
"With Berklee Connect, there are people who have navigated that same journey before you, they’ve done it successfully, and they want to help the people who are just starting out. I think that’s a special and unique thing." —Noah Teshu BM ’14
Built for Alumni, by Alumni
“What we heard from alumni was a real desire to get involved and help younger graduates navigate their careers, but many didn’t know how to connect or where their experience could be most useful,” says Katie Vitolins BM ’04, vice president of alumni services and Berklee Connect, who spearheaded the initiative. “There are people who have already navigated the same journey, and they want to help those who are just getting started.”
Vitolins is one of them. For her, the project is personal.
A self-described small-town girl, she came to Berklee and majored in professional music, focusing her studies on ethnomusicology. After graduating, she entered the emerging digital music world in its earliest days. Working for a tiny online world music store out of an attic in Arlington, Massachusetts, she uploaded homespun CDs from overseas and built rudimentary online storefronts.
She later took a job at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where she got her first look at the business machinery that propels a creative institution. After her husband graduated from Berklee with a degree in music production and engineering and film scoring, the pair relocated to Los Angeles. That’s where Berklee’s network delivered.
“We moved on a song and a prayer. We didn’t have anything lined up. The advice given to me was: ‘Make sure that you tap Berklee’s alumni community in LA. There are lots of people doing amazing things,’” she recalls.
Before there was a platform like Connect, Justine Taormino BM ’06, then a West Coast associate director of alumni affairs, invited the pair to Berklee events and made crucial introductions.
“My husband reconnected with Berklee alumni, which immediately got him in at a small post-production audio and music house in Los Angeles. He got a job straightaway,” Vitolins says.
Meanwhile, Vitolins’s combination of musical training and early digital experience helped her land at Universal, just as the company was launching a digital operation and striking early download deals with Apple and Amazon.
A professional connection at Universal opened the door to Spotify, prompting a move to New York. She later worked at Amazon Music, where she helped build Amazon Music for Artists.
While at Amazon Music, she joined Berklee’s board, harnessing her industry experience and connections to benefit the place where it all began. Across those roles, she strived to support creative professionals as the music industry rapidly changed: understanding what artists needed, then building products and systems designed to help them navigate it.
That experience would eventually lead her to Berklee Connect full time. Vitolins was eager to apply what she knew about product marketing at Spotify and Amazon to benefit the next generation of creative professionals.
“What interested me about this role was the ability to make an impact on a smaller, more intimate scale,” Vitolins says.
Brooke Parrott BM ’07, a touring musician and one of the project’s consultants, saw the same appeal.
“This is a small but powerful team, and Katie is such a kind, thoughtful person. These are all super smart, empathetic humans who are doing such a great job listening to alumni and trying to build something that’s truly useful to them,” Parrott says.
The Berklee Connect team at the Homecoming Alumni Brunch, from left: Rachel Chodkowski, David Lowry, Dave Rodger, Noah Teshu BM ’14, and Katie Vitolins BM ’04.
Mike Spencer
Scaling the Power of Personal Connection
As Vitolins knows firsthand, creative careers don’t always unfold in straight lines. They’re built through skills and persistence, but also through people: a former classmate who answers an email, an alum with just the right contact in a new city, a mentor willing to share hard-won advice.
“Graduating is exciting, but also kind of scary: ‘How do I navigate this gap? What do I do next?’ With Berklee Connect, there are people who have navigated that same journey before you, they’ve done it successfully, and they want to help the people who are just starting out. I think that’s a special and unique thing,” says Noah Teshu BM ’14, a software engineer who consulted on the project.
Connect is an attempt to make those moments easier to discover, build, and sustain.
“Once you go through Berklee, you know how difficult and competitive it can be. Seeing that someone else navigated that successfully means something, and I think a really high percentage of Berklee alumni will be happy to pick up the phone for someone else who went through it. That’s the whole spirit,” Teshu says.
There’s also an element of pride: a chance for alumni not only to help one another, but to celebrate triumphs.
“People who have been in the industry for a while feel so strongly about helping up-and-coming artists navigate the changes that they have already figured out,” Parrott says. “This is one more place for Berklee to really shout about the accomplishments of those alumni and for those alumni to share their accomplishments.”
A Lifelong Source of Support
Berklee Connect will also include benefits and discounts geared toward creative professionals, from hardware and software to artist services and, potentially, areas such as insurance and wellness. For Vitolins, it all comes back to helping artists build sustainable careers around the work they love.
“The world needs what we make together, and we must find a way to do that. At a moment when the world can feel increasingly divided, art and creativity matter more than ever. They have the power to bring people together, bridge cultures and perspectives, and help us see one another more clearly,” Vitolins says.
“That’s why we need more creative people making meaningful work, and sustainable ways for them to build careers around it," she says, "I hope Berklee Connect can help make that possible.”
Ready to log in? Head to alumni.berklee.edu to get started.
