Gymzl Alumni

Context

Gymzl Alumni is a non-profit initiative I founded and ran for about five years, tied to my high school (Gymnazium Zlicin). It connected current students with alumni who had already left the building and gone on to diverse careers.

Problem

High school students rarely meet working professionals in a setting where they can ask real questions. Career guidance is abstract; LinkedIn profiles are distant. Students needed access to people - not polished keynotes, but honest conversations about paths they might not know exist.

My role

Founder and sole organizer: sourcing speakers, booking venues, managing logistics, curating line-ups, and running alumni meet-ups across multiple cities.

Constraints

• Volunteer-run: No budget, no staff - everything depended on personal relationships and goodwill.
• Annual cadence: The main event happened once a year; momentum had to survive the gaps.
• Diverse audience: Students ranged from 15 to 19, with wildly different interests and maturity levels.

What I did

• Organized a full day of alumni talks each year with a deliberately broad mix: engineers (David Pavlik - Netflix, SpaceX), politics (Martina Dlabajova - European Parliament), media (foreign correspondent for Cesky rozhlas), and academia (Cambridge alumni).
• Ran semi-regular alumni meet-ups in several Czech cities - informal coffee gatherings so graduates could stay connected across cohorts.
• Curated each year's line-up to avoid a single "type" of success story.

Key decisions

• Breadth over depth: Showing students many different paths mattered more than deep-diving one industry.
• People over slides: The format prioritized Q&A and hallway conversations over polished presentations.

Result

Five years of consistent programming. Students stayed after talks because a single sentence had landed. Alumni reconnected across cohorts in cities beyond Prague.

What this shows

Community building, initiative without institutional backing, and the belief that education is also about who you get to meet while you are still figuring out what is possible.