Change has defined our time at Simmons. 

Over our four years, we watched Simmons College become Simmons University. During that change, our department, then part of the College of Arts and Sciences, was absorbed into the new Gwen Ifill College of Media, Arts, and Humanities. While we grappled with the changes of a new name, a new college, and a new dean, we also adjusted to a new physical space after our Comm Lab was moved from the third floor of Lefavour to a newly renovated space in the Main College Building. 

While we watched our school change, the world changed around us. We got to see Boston continue to grow as new buildings and parks have gone up in the Fenway area. We’ve seen the communications industry, which many of us are about to enter, evolve with technological advances and the demands of modern media. Through these changes, we’ve grown as a community, as individuals, and as communicators.

In our final semester at Simmons, our class faced the biggest change of all: COVID-19. We transitioned from in-person classes to meetings via Zoom; many of us moved off of the Residence Campus and our graduation was canceled. In losing the final months of our senior year, we’ve had to face changes in the way we learn, the way we work, and the way we get to celebrate our achievements and showcase our portfolios.   

In light of this situation, CommTracks and the way we’re presenting it to you has also changed. As a team, we’ve spent this semester working hard to design and collect content for our traditional print magazine, so the decision to transition to a digital format was not an easy one to make. As the COVID-19 pandemic complicates printing and distributing a tangible publication, we hope that this website will still allow us to share our peers’ stories in a way that is accessible to the community. 

In our Zoom discussions about how to proceed, Lauren Del Vacchio kindly stepped up to help us build the website. We couldn’t have made it work without her. With our virtual resources, Lauren on our team, and the support of the spring 2020 Studio 5 class, we’ve been able to continue the tradition and bring you the 15th edition of CommTracks. 

While this isn’t the CommTracks we initially envisioned, it captures our class’s ability to not only cope with change, but to adapt accordingly and to learn from it. None of us expected our senior year to end this way, but we hope this content will help commemorate and celebrate our time at Simmons as a COMM-unity.