Page 29 - BusinessWest July 7, 2021

The ‘Destination Isenberg’ signs soon to grace lawns across the country will have real meaning this year, with the school back to fully in-person learning this fall.
lenges, even global pandemics, stand in the way of achieving goals and improving continuously.
As she noted, this mindset will serve the insti- tution well in the future as it and all of its many competitors prepare to return to normal, but not a world exactly like the one that existed 16
months ago.
“It was also obvious to me in March and April
of 2020 that everyone was going to be forced to be remote, at least for some period of time,” she said. “We’d been in the online space for 20 years, so we were ahead of the game. But now, sudden- ly, everyone was going to be playing the game. They weren’t all going to be good at it; some of them still aren’t good at it, but think they are.
“But now, there are going to be more people joining this competitive space,” she went on. “And some of them have more resources than we do. So we needed to say, ‘we’re just going to keep plowing forward. We need to be better than they were because that’s the only way we’re going to maintain our competitive position.”
For this issue and its focus on education, Busi- nessWest talked at length with Masse about her challenging and, in many ways, intriguing first two years at the helm at Isenberg, and especially about how the school will take the experiences from the pandemic and use them to make the school, as she said, better than it was before any- one heard of COVID-19.
Getting Down to Business
The lawn signs were first introduced a year or so ago.
They say ‘Destination Isenberg,’ and were intended to be placed on the front lawns of
the homes of students bound for the school — enrollment in which is increasingly becoming a point of pride.
While those first signs to be issued were tech- nically accurate, many of the students didn’t have the Amherst campus as their actual destination because of COVID, said Masse, adding that that
“I said early on that we’re
not going to be looking at this pandemic, and all the things
that it wrought for us in terms of remote teaching, remote learning, and remote work, as a short-term problem that we’re just trying to solve. I said that we’re going to learn things, and we’re going to carry them over to when we came back and be better than we were in March of 2020.”
the latest signs — they’re at the printer now and will be distributed soon — speak the full truth: students will be back in the fall.
There will be a party in August to welcome them to campus, and planning continues for an orientation that will feature programs and events not only for freshmen but also the sophomores who couldn’t enjoy such an experience last fall because of the pandemic. As part of those cel- ebrations, there will be recognition of the nation-
Isenberg
Continued on page 44
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