In January 2020 (prior to the end of the world), I was selected from a competitive applicant pool to serve as one of three student ambassadors for Real Chemistry (previously W2O) Center for Social Commerce at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. In this role, I was anticipating attending South By Southwest 2020 in Austin, TX, to support W2O's programming, as well as spend my summer in Manhattan working in the W2O office as an intern in the Corporate Strategy team. However, COVID-19 had different plans.

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Unfortunately, SXSW 2020 was one of the first major events to be cancelled as a result of COVID-19 and as one of the most hard hit American cities, New York City was not safe to live in, commute in and work in during the summer of 2020, and therefore I was unable to complete my internship.

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While we had anticipated passing the reigns to a new group of ambassadors during Fall 2020, we were pleasantly surprised when W2O asked us to stay on and help conduct a long-term research project regarding the sentiments of Syracuse University students surrounding the challenges of COVID-19 on a college campus. Along with my fellow ambassadors, we used Fall 2020 to extensively plan, take part in a variety of research and finally gather all our thoughts and findings into a research report of which W2O helped us finalized.

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Throughout the fall, we created and distributed surveys, conducted one on one interviews with a diverse array of students and finally ran multiple focus groups to better understand the Syracuse community and their common struggles of continuing college throughout a global pandemic. During such a hard year for many, I was grateful to be able to learn more about the unique circumstances of a variety of my peers and provide them with a report that can help them better understand the sentiments of the campus they are on.

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Below is a variety of the content I, in collaboration with the two other student ambassadors (Regan Talley and Karley Warden), have produced over the course of our role, as well as a collection of the press coverage our research report has received thus far.

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