Admitted Student Session

Posted March 31, 2020 by William Crouch

On Saturday, we had our first admitted student information session. With everything being remote now, the session had to be moved online through Zoom. It was actually a really interesting way of having the session work. Everybody, about 120 admitted students, started in an initial Zoom session that went over the basics of SLIS such as campus, professors, rankings, that was presented by our admissions team. Some faculty members from all the concentrations then introduced themselves to give students a sense of who their future faculty will be. After some questions that came from a chat function, everybody moved into various different Zoom breakout sessions based on their specific interests or concentrations.

I was placed in the Archives and History session with Professor Kathy Wisser of SLIS, Professor Sarah Leonard of the History department, and alum Sarah Nafis, to answer questions that these students had about the program. One question that was asked was about the feasibility of working fulltime and taking classes full time. I was able to address that by detailing how Simmons handles student employees by capping their hours at 20 per week to allow students to maintain a work life balance. In addition, Professor Wisser and Leonard detailed how each program functions as each one has different credit requirements and different hours per class. After these questions, we rejoined the main Zoom call and the admissions team answered some more questions regarding how future classes may be conducted with the pandemic, housing options, and how the program has dealt with the current crisis.

Overall, it was a successful event, and I look forward to seeing many of these students in the fall when we are hopefully able to return to a sense of normalcy. This virus has forced us to evolve in many unexpected ways but there are benefits such as how we were able to get everybody to attend this information session when it has typically been more difficult with it being in person. We are all having to adapt and grow but it will make us all stronger and better once we reach the other side of this crisis.