Sports Communication: Will Dean, Junior

A lot of the off-campus opportunities that are so supplementary to a sports communication education—opportunities to go to the Garden to report or to do a sports PR project on, for example, all of those are suddenly unavailable. The experiential learning component would be the biggest change for me.

When you are totally online the emphasis is on finding creative ways to use technology, and the emphasis is on the truly academic part—because you don’t have the experiential part of it. [Professors] can’t say ‘Okay, your assignment now is to go to this game and notice five things about the marketing you see around the stadium,’ now it has become all that much more academic. 

I’ve been quite lucky that the pandemic struck the second semester of my sophomore year, it’s been strange because I feel like I’ve been on pause for about a year, a year and a half. I’m skipping basically from second semester sophomore to first semester senior. I’m really, really hoping that things return to normal so that I can get some of those experiences; taking sports management, a class I’ve been looking forward to taking for a long time …  so many of the components of why I came to Emerson and to Boston in general. I do really hope and pray that next semester things return to normal so that I can at least get one last semester of everything I hoped and dreamed of coming here.