Alums

Dear Graduate Alums,

We are delighted to invite all graduate alumni to a special reunion and conference in Amherst next fall. Please save October 5–7, 2012 for the occasion. October is a beautiful time to visit the Valley, and a fresh, energetic point in the academic year. It is a perfect time to host a gathering of graduate alums from a broad range of professions.

Our goal is to showcase alumni work and ideas—to each other, to current students and faculty, and to interested visitors and members of the UMass community. We plan on collecting information to help us develop and refine the department’s graduate programs in ways that respond to academic and professional realities—and of course we want to meet, talk, eat, celebrate and reconnect. This spring, we’ll send a second round of correspondence to solicit your participation in thematic sessions.

By fall 2012, we’ll have completed an AQAD (Academic Quality Assessment and Development) review, involving a panel of faculty reviewers from outside UMass. We’ll also be looking forward to moving into the New Academic Classroom Building, now in the design stages and breaking ground this spring. It is very exciting. We won’t have the building until 2014, but we’ll have lots of plans and images to share. Our new home will be a communication laboratory, a place of creativity, invention, discovery and collaboration in media studies, social interaction, cinema, rhetoric and performance, and the study of institutions, technologies and policies.

We hope the prospect of this graduate alumni reunion is as exciting to you as it is to us. Please consider your travel options and resources for fall 2012 and let Debra Madigan know by December 1, 2011 if you expect to attend (a “yes” will not commit you, but will help us plan).

We send our best wishes for a peaceful fall.

Cheers,

Lisa Henderson, chair
Department of Communication

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