Program Overview

The Communication program requires you to integrate a broad range of competencies, approaches, and theories. Although a minor is not required, we recommend a minor that complements your study such as Business Administration, Public Administration, or Communication and the Arts.

The program offers contemporary communication studies emphasizing comprehensive understanding of communication in traditional and new media and study in depth of particular forms of communication. Students come to understand how communication happens; how messages are put into visual and verbal codes; how messages are filtered through various media; how they are interpreted in different contexts; and how they construct those contexts.

Skills

Skills students refine in the program include:

• Speaking effectively to groups
• Conducting journalistic interviews
• Being persuasive
• Being appropriately assertive
• Facilitating a meeting
• Assessing personality types
• Asking effective questions
• Developing a strategy to communicate organizational change
• Preparing letters and memos delivering good and bad news
• Discerning underlying organizational problems
• Assessing communication practices of an organization
• Leading brainstorming sessions
• Managing information