Simmons Missed Connections, one of various anonymous Instagram accounts created by Simmons students, revealed their identity on April 24.

Senior Women’s and Gender Studies major Kas Hunt shared a post to the followers of Missed Connections. “Thank you for interacting with this account, trusting me when sending submissions, and trying to make connections with other Simmons students!” he said in his caption.

Hunt created the account in May 2020, just a few months after students were sent home due to COVID. “I was feeling really disconnected from the community,” he said. “I decided that that would be something I’d wanna run and hope to still feel connected to campus and other Simmons students even though I was living in Connecticut in my parents’ home.”

Missed Connections was created with the intent that students could send in a submission about strangers they encountered on campus in hopes that they would form an actual connection with them. “That’s pretty rare,” Hunt said. “It has happened a few times and it makes me really happy when someone actually finds someone.”

“The first ever post on the account is my sister, Grace, sending me a submission that was totally made up just to get the ball rolling,” Hunt explained. Since its creation, Simmons Missed Connections has gained nearly 1,000 followers and amassed almost 300 posts.

Hunt said he really enjoys the behind the scenes aspect of running the account. “It’s really interesting running a page like this because I get to see how many times a post has been sent out to people or how many times it’s been [interacted with].”

Many posts, like the former, on Missed Connections were humorous, but many others shared a genuine desire to form connections with those they missed. One submission was “a collection of short poems that they had written about people that they had seen on campus,” Hunt shared. “They sent them to me and I thought that was really beautiful so I posted it in a series.”

Many of the posts on the account center missed connections between LGBTQ students. “It makes me really happy as a queer person to run an account where I can have submissions that display LGBTQ love, interests, and connections,” Hunt said in a follow up email. “I think it’s really important to have representation like this of real college students. It’s authentic.”

Hunt worked to distinguish his account from other popular Simmons Instagram pages. “I want to focus on connecting with the community and keep it very positive and light.”

Hunt will be graduating in May, and is planning to pass the account off to another student to continue. “I tentatively found someone and they’re gonna get back to me by the end of April on whether or not they will fully commit to taking over the account.”

“I didn’t want this to be something that ended just because I’ve graduated,” Hunt emphasized. “Obviously people are still gonna be going to Simmons, still gonna be having missed connections, and if they chose to, they should be able to have someone in the community and have this account.”