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August 24, 2020

Dear members of the Mount Holyoke community,

Welcome to a new academic year, one unlike any other. While we cannot gather to celebrate this moment in person and on campus, our faculty, staff and students are learning and working together across the United States and the world to ensure that our sense of community and of purpose remain undiminished.

To the 1,965 students who are taking classes this fall at the College: while we are all saddened not to be together enjoying the sunshine on Skinner Green, congregating in the amphitheater, and crossing paths between classes, on the way to practice, or to the Dining Commons, we will still be connecting with each other to build a community of exceptional leaders and learners, and to ensure that your experience bears all the hallmarks of the welcoming, rigorous and engaged Mount Holyoke we know. 

To the faculty and staff: I cannot thank you enough for the extraordinary effort and detailed preparations for the start of this year, both when we thought we might be welcoming half of our students on campus, and then, again, when we determined that, to protect both you and them, this should be a fully remote fall semester. 

The Mount Holyoke faculty has designed a new educational model, known as FIT: Flexible Immersive Teaching. FIT strives to preserve the immersive and challenging academic experience of being in a Mount Holyoke classroom. In rethinking their courses, their teaching, and the schedule for this moment, the faculty were prioritizing the student learning experience, and the importance of the connections made in the classroom--just  two of the many reasons they were ranked No. 1 in The Princeton Review of Colleges for “Professors Get High Marks.”

I hope that you will find ways to be fully a part of the Mount Holyoke community and experience, wherever you may be this semester, and I look forward to all that lies ahead as we take on the new opportunities and challenges before us.

With my very best wishes,

Sonya