With the Big Game coming up, there’s another big game brewing: Stanford and Cal are neck and neck for the $25,000 Kickstart Alumni Challenge, with USC at their heels. Michigan made a huge leap in the rankings this week, and is now just one point behind UT Austin. The action isn’t just with the big schools, though — Tulane and Carnegie Mellon are also serious contenders for the prize.

These schools, among all US colleges and universities, are competing through December 31st for this trophy: a $25K donation awarded to the school with the most alums on Kickstart, Yahoo!’s new product that connects college students and recent grads with alumni. The purpose of Kickstart is to help students and alums find each other for career help, whether it’s for internships and jobs or advice.

We kicked off less than a month ago, and we’ve been overwhelmed with the enthusiastic feedback we’ve received. Many users wanted to spread the word to their friends and coworkers; we’re putting the final touches on an invite feature that will be out shortly. Many users added international schools and companies; not only did we increase support for these locales, we also overhauled our search so it’s easier for users to find organizations and people as the numbers increase. Most notably, we’re seeing a lot of support from alumni communities who have been lacking a solution to connect with fellow alums, including new grads.

So help your school win the prize! It doesn’t matter if your school is big or small; what matters is which one has alumni who step up and represent. Sign up on Kickstart and spread the word to your fellow alums to show their school pride.

While the $25,000 prize is a great way to show support for your school, you’ll also be helping current students see what is possible after graduation. Your profile could be that special flag that turns the game around on a future grad’s career. And who knows, maybe another alum on the site will reach out and offer a whole new play on your own career. The best way to maximize all these chances is to put your best foot forward in your profile and get out there.

Good luck!

Cynthia Johanson, Dan Wascovich and the Kickstart Team

Today we began previewing Kickstart, a new service aimed at helping college students and recent grads connect with alumni, employers, and professionals. You may have seen some of the press coverage of the launch. Our first day live has been exciting, with the number of profiles in the system growing steadily by the hour.

Kickstart was inspired by research we did with college students who are experiencing first hand the biggest transition of their lives: their initial career choice and job/internship search. Students and recent grads kept saying, “I don’t know who to connect with to help me get a job.”

With this in mind, we came up with the idea of creating a community where students and alumni connect around finding internships, jobs, and career advice. Students, while active online socially and looking at job listings, don’t have a way to create and ultimately benefit from a truly “professional” network.

The existing options available to students are either too tailored towards seasoned professionals or too geared towards staying in touch with friends. This problem is compounded by the fact that finding that first job or internship is one of the most stressful parts of a student or recent grad’s life. After all, for every student whose parents helped him get an internship with an investment bank, thousands are left pounding the pavement and sending resumes into the black holes of company recruiting sites.

This “preview” release of Kickstart is intended as a first step towards creating a community for college students and alumni to connect. For this release, we’re focused on getting alums and professional signed up in advance of our rollout to schools in January. You’ll notice that, for now, the site is streamlined towards setting up profiles and basic connections and messaging.

Why would alumni sign up? An interesting thing we noticed is that a generic “help the students!” message sent to alumni generally gets resistance. However, if a junior at your school in the same major reaches out with a personal message for advice, we’ve found that most people are more than happy to help. It’s also a great way to source good candidates and to reconnect with fellow alums and old colleagues.

To help encourage people to join, we’re offering a $25,000 dollar grant for the U.S. college that has the most alumni signed up by the end of the year.

We expect Kickstart to evolve rapidly now that it’s public. We’re working on the next batch of features, and we’re putting them in front of our target users to ensure we keep addressing their needs. We’d love to hear any ideas to make this professional network the place for college students, recent grads and alums connect and meet their goals.

Cynthia Johanson, Dan Wascovich and the Kickstart Team