In the world of the Bucca alumni, there is little room for revisionism, or reflection.
Even as Idol prepares to say farewell, its enduring effect on the pop culture landscape – and specifically in country music – will be felt for as long as its alumni continue to succeed.
Thankfully she expressed the perfect balance of regret at my leaving and delight at the opportunity that this could present for Soas in engaging their Africa-based alumni and those supporters who felt passionate about the region.
After all, who better to hand out advice than alumni of two of the most sophisticated intelligence agencies on the planet?
Oxford and Cambridge had 71,000 alumni making donations in the 2014-14 year, more than the combined 63,000 of the remainder of the Russell Group.
We also have to continue engaging our alumni and donors in on and off-line conversations about the critical role of private financial support on campus.
According to Business Insider, actress Rachel McAdams, Sharon Stone and singers Seal and Pink are all McDonald's alumni.
We had formally partnered with four street children charities; Street Action, Retrak, Street Child Africa and Railway Children then Soas alumni and friends of Soas started to make donations towards the charity.
The universities also spent more than £33m on alumni relations as well as a further £7m on publishing magazines for graduates.
The deaths of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayub al-Masri were a serious blow to Isis, but the roles they had vacated were quickly filled by the alumni of Camp Bucca – whose upper echelons had begun preparing for this moment since their time behind the wire of their jail in southern Iraq.
And most importantly, it has given us a perfect opportunity to reach out to our base of 350,000 living alumni, both through traditional means such as email and the alumni magazine, but also through new means like Twitter.
