Being a communication studies major is a thrill. In my intercultural communications class last week, some classmates of mine were venting that, sometimes, other students on campus see us as the “easy major” or that we’re “not important” because we don’t look as busy. That’s because we work hard to perfect what we’re learning and therefore, it looks less difficult. And even when the work bogs us down, here are some perspectives on why I would never trade out this major.
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We can see the theories we learn in class in our daily interactions. When my friends tell me they’ve been imagining how to talk to their other friends about serious topics, I can see they’re using imagined interaction theory from interpersonal comm. When I see groups of friends hanging out at the dinning hall and one of them is staring at her phone, I can call out her absent presence from critical issues of mass comm. I can see how the media frames stories and news. It’s cool to know what I’m learning I can apply in the real world.
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Doing the senior comp in comm! Comps are hard work and take a lot of effort, but for us majors we get to choose how to do them: through rhetorical analysis, qualitative studies, or quantitative studies. I got to choose what topic I wanted to study and how I was going to do it. With the help of my professor and the support of my comping classmates, climbing the mountain that is comps was not as bad as we all think it is for the major.
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On that point, senior comping is also a class for the major! I got six credits for researching and designing a study on how Notre Dame represents the Irish. We’re lucky we get class credit out of this, other major’s comps are outside of their class load, take as much time, and they don’t get credit for it. It is nice to see where my efforts go.
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We can use the theories we learn in class to improve our communication with others. The best theory I ever learned was how to deal with conflicts with others in my intro class. We learn what we are doing when we communicate and how we can improve our communication. I’ve learned the art of persuasion, I’ve learned how to improve my journalism practices, and I can use do qualitative studies. Everything we learn in class can be used for the rest of our lives.
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Writing long papers is no longer hard. Eight-page ethnography due next week? Yeah, that’s not as much a struggle after doing similarly long papers for the level 200 and up classes. When other classes assign 10-page papers, it will never be as intimidating because we’ve done them before. For us seniors that have comped already, it seems miniscule to write that many pages.
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Taking classes on mass communication makes us critical on the issues we see in the news. After learning about framing news stories, how the news emphasizes certain values, and can enforce stereotypes, it becomes easy to see it in all news outlets we take in. I feel less susceptible to believing in everything I see; the classes make us more accountable of news makers.
Being a comm major is time consuming; it’s just that while we don’t study in labs, we still have pressures of having only three assignments for the semester that are worth a lot of points. We’re passionate about what we do, even if it seems like we don’t do much, it’s because we are always doing it. If anything, at least I can say my major has made me a better person while I enjoy it.