When people ask me what I am studying in college, I’ve had to start buffering my answer by adding my minor or a “pre-law though.” I do this because the world’s schema of communication majors are airheads and sorority girls (I fall into both categories sometimes but that’s not the point). When I entered college, people would ask me what communication entailed, and I had literally no idea, or people would ask me why I am paying out-of-state tuition at UCLA just to learn how to communicate, and again I also was wondering this myself. I was equally good at every subject in high school, so it’s not like I was limited to the major that is stereotyped to be the easiest, I was full heartedly making a choice. The real kicker was when one of my Tik Toks about being a comm major went viral, and suddenly 65 thousand people were very interested in telling me how stupid I am.
I considered changing my major because of this, and found myself scrolling through every possible UCLA major. But, nothing struck my fancy as much as the sound of communication (even though I still literally had no idea what the point of it was). I took Comm 10 in fall quarter, comm 187 and comm 1 in winter quarter, but it wasn’t until this quarter that I fully understood the importance of my future degree. Sitting (struggling) in my computing 10a lecture, as the oddly put-together slides were only accompanied by my professor reading right off of them, it hit me. I realized that other majors seem harder simply because the professors aren’t trained in communicating the information.
Communication classes seem easy and straightforward because the people teaching them are literally college educated in getting their points across in an engaging and effective way. Yes, STEM classes have very complex ideas, equations and memorization. But in Comm 10 we had to memorize dozens of lists and sub-lists word for word, and this seemed easy to me because my professor had laid out the concepts in a way that got me excited to know them. In my computing class, my roommate’s math classes or even my humanities GEs, my professors read off confusing slides and don’t actively communicate with their audience. They know their material front to back, but they don’t analyze the body language of their students to realize we have no idea what is going on, or we are bored out of our minds. There’s a reason that your success in most classes depends on how strong your TA is; it’s because there’s no way you’re going to learn the information if they don’t have any communication skills.
Sitting in a communication in environmental science class, with mostly junior and senior environmental science majors, it hit me how much I had actually learned in my comm classes. This class was all about how scientists can’t get anything done with their findings simply because they have no idea how to communicate their knowledge to the general public. Future scientists, like my peers in this class, will eventually hire people like me to make sure their work makes a difference in the world. Human resource managers, social media managers and regular managers, they all work to make other people’s work reach their intended audience in a way that gets attention. All other majors will depend on a communication major at some point in their life to write their papers, advertise their ideas or even transform their work into movies, news shows and books that the public will see.
I love communication. I love being able to read every one I interact with beyond just what their saying and knowing ways to persuade brands, officials and any type of person I could come across. I love knowing how to make rooms of people laugh in a foolproof way and how to professionally flirt using scientifically tested methods. I love writing about issues that are important to me and knowing that whoever reads them will understand and hopefully be entertained. So, I think that it’s time we break the communication stereotype because this world would be a lot more confusing without us.