Brandon Pollock '10

Once you first stepped foot on Mayflower Hill, your tour guide probably told you, “Colby has a great Alumni Network.” That statement led me to think, “What does that even mean? Who cares? Tell me about the parties and athletics.”

Until this summer. After a plan to spend my summer in China fell through, I sent an introductory e-mail to Brandon Pollock ’10, Co-Founder of Blue Reserve Water LLC, on a whim. Through the Colby Alumni Office, Brandon and Co-Founder Nick Friedman ’10 had sent an e-mail out to the Colby student body outlining an opportunity to work for them in their new Boston office this summer.

I wrote the e-mail on May 23. With summer right around the corner, I figured there was very little chance that there would be any opportunity still available, as their e-mail had gone out in March.

To my surprise, Brandon replied to me within hours, simply saying, “We can definitely give you some experience this summer. Give me a call.”

If you’re a Colby student, you know the stresses that come with finding something meaningful to do with your summer. But by sending one e-mail, I had landed an opportunity at a young entrepreneurial start-up with two passionate leaders—exactly what I wanted.

Don’t get me wrong, Colby parties are awesome and the athletic department is amazing, but Brandon’s e-mail immediately convinced me that the Colby Alumni Network might be just as cool, if not cooler.

And it didn’t stop there. As I prodded Nick and Brandon for information on how they created Blue Reserve, they continuously referenced the Colby Alumni Network--whether it was getting office space or finding clients, the Alumni Network always pulled through with accommodations.

Working for Nick and Brandon was an awesome experience. Blue Reserve Water LLC sells and leases bottleless water coolers, an environmentally-friendly and economically sensible alternative to bottled water. At its very core, it is a business that fights the greed of the beverage industry and their synthesized manufactured demand of extremely wasteful bottled water.

The e-mail promised this was not a typical internship. And it definitely wasn’t--my experiences included moving 30 75-pound coolers up to their second floor office, installing six coolers at the University of New England in the middle of a downpour, making an advertisement video, creating sales leads through face-to-face interactions with office secretaries, sitting in on meetings with lawyers, delivering coolers to New York and writing daily blog posts.

In addition, watching Nick and Brandon work together and observing their energy was so inspiring. As an aspiring entrepreneur, I’m convinced that I would not have been able to find a better experience anywhere else.

To be honest, I’m not totally sure what I want to do when I graduate, but I rest-easy knowing that the Colby Alumni Network has my back and that accomplished graduates like Nick and Brandon had similar uncertainty as they entered their junior year.

I can’t wait to pay it forward.

Check out the Blue Reserve blog I worked on: http://www.bluereserve.com/blog/