As we wrap up the fall semester and look back on everything that everyone in the Communication Department has accomplished over the last three months, I am truly amazed.
We began the semester celebrating 100 years of Manhattan College’s home in The Bronx with a live broadcast of Whitman on Walls! at Gaelic Park. This performance combined the talents of the international theater company Campagnia de’ Colombari with our students, alumni and faculty, and COMM students crewed the live broadcast of the performance on BronxNet. Soon after that, Dr. Arshia Anwer received Manhattan College’s Costello Award for Excellence in Teaching, the first COMM professor to be presented with that honor. We ran courses taught by Wall Street Journal editor and reporter Jared Diamond, award-winning user interface designer Michael Pilla and PR consultant Quentin Langley, author of "Business and the Culture of Ethics." Led by Joe Ruggiero, our students produced live broadcasts of Jaspers' soccer and basketball for ESPN+, and in November we inducted new members into Lambda Pi Eta, the National Communication Association’s honor society. Special congratulations go out to students in COMM 120 Forensics/Debate, cross-listed with Philosophy and taught by Dr. David Bollert, for going three rounds in a national debate competition (they tied with Yale!), and Claire Ganguin for being invited to Orlando to crew ESPN broadcasts for the MAAC Women’s Volleyball Championship. Our new Manager of Media Production Jeff Anderson has accomplished some long-needed maintenance and added functionality, including camera shading in our TV Studio and screen sharing and Internet access in the edit lab. Dr. Kern-Stone is leading our mentorship program, connecting first-year and sophomore students with juniors and seniors, as well as our juniors and seniors with alumni. Senior Cara Fitzgerald has been working with the School of Engineering on a National Science Foundation grant producing instructional videos in our studio, and junior Angelica Niedermeyer published an article based on her Thailand study abroad in U.S. News & World Report.
COMM students in college clubs have been busy as well: our award-winning newspaper The Quadrangle is back in print after a pandemic-era period of primarily online publication, Lotus magazine conducted photoshoots for this year’s issue, AAF students are preparing their campaigns for National Student Advertising Competition, and PRSSA officers Madison Mulkigian and Victoria Correia were invited to attend PRSA’s ICON conference in Dallas. MCTV produced more episodes of the Lasallian Women and Gender Resource Center podcast, and WRCM continues to broadcast out of its street-level studio in RLC. In addition to AAF and PRSSA, we have just become institutional members of the Broadcast Education Association (BEA), which brings with it many benefits to our students, including opportunities for scholarships and professional mentoring.
Students are learning outside the classroom as well, including at internships with ABC News, NBCUniversal, Yes Network, Warner Music Group, BronxNet, IdeaMix, Adikteev and Creative Marketing Media, among many other places. ABC News intern and junior journalism concentration student Kyla Guilfoil already has published several stories at abcnews.com, showing that working as editor-in-chief of The Quadrangle has served her well.
Our department concluded the semester by celebrating with our alumni at a venue near Times Square. We hope to make this an annual tradition so that we can make connections between current students and alumni and stay connected with you even after you graduate.
Speaking of graduates, we are excited that one of our alumni is coming back to teach for us: Joseph Murtagh graduated in 2014 as the winner of our Leadership and Service Award and now works as a group director for global communication strategy for VMLY&R, a global communications strategy company with clients like Coca-Cola, Dell, Greenpeace, T Mobile and Ford. Murtagh will be teaching our Advertising Campaigns course (COMM 414). Other special courses we are running this spring are Queer History, Culture, and Media, Magazine Writing and Game Design & Development.
Please read through this issue of COMM-unity to learn about the amazing things our students and faculty are doing. If we missed anything (and I’m sure we did—our students and alumni are experiencing so many wonderful successes), please share them with us so we can share them with the world across our social media channels. Be sure to search for @MCCOMMDEPT or Manhattan College Communication Department on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Congratulations to our December graduates, and we look forward to a busy and exciting spring semester.
Dr. Michael Grabowski
Chair, Communication Department
