This year marks the ten-year anniversary of Moody College of Communication’s innovative communication and leadership degree (CLD). Designed as an interdisciplinary program, it brings together courses from multiple departments and gives students a flexible, customizable degree plan that aims to educate and inspire future leaders to lead toward positive change. And, perhaps most notably, it’s the only degree program like it in the country.

The CLD degree is built upon the fact that society needs ethical, effective leaders and all leaders need to be ethical, effective communicators. Teaching students how to become empowering leaders while also being exceptional communicators requires a unique approach.

"CLD is like a ‘choose your own adventure’ degree,” explained Natalie Tindall, director of the communication and leadership degree program. “Students get the opportunity to decide what they want to do. We want to take the guardrails off; we want you to explore and figure out what your capabilities are and build within those buckets.”

Tindall likes to compare CLD to Legos. With standard building blocks, she explains, you can build a tower, you can stack them next to one another, but there are only so many combinations you can create. With Legos, however, they are flexible, movable, you can build a bridge, a spaceship or an entirely new world.  

“You can let your imagination run free and run wild, and the limits are what you put on yourself,” Tindall says. “So, every student in CLD uses their Lego bricks in a unique and novel way. A person will take their pile of bricks to build a metaphor for leadership.” 

CLD launched in 2016 with the help of Minette Drumwright, a professor in Moody College’s Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations. Drumwright directed the program for six years.

"No one can deny that we have a worldwide shortage of effective and ethical leaders," Drumwright said. "The communication and leadership degree addresses that shortage through it's graduates."

While the program may just now be celebrating it's 10th anniversary, the idea for such a program is much older, Drumwright says.

"The concept and the plan for the communication and leadership degree is actually 22 years old," Drumwright said, adding that she served on multiple committees that lobbied for the degree from 2004-2016. "We had a lot of student and faculty support for the degree but we needed a dean to support us."

Drumwright says that it wasn't until Moody College's former dean, Jay Bernhardt, came on board that the idea became reality. Bernhard had studied leadership and recognized the importance of such a program.

"So today, at 10 years old, the communication and leadership degree is one of the most in-demand degrees at Moody College so we're very pleased that it was embraced," Drumwright said.

Cassandre Giguere Alvarado, Moody College’s senior associate dean for undergraduate education and teaching excellence, says that there isn’t any one type of student that enrolls in CLD. To put it simply, a degree in CLD gives them the opportunity to not only learn about themselves, but the type of industry and career they’d most like to explore as a leader.

“I think the beauty of the CLD degree and the kind of students it attracts is that it doesn’t prepare you for just one path,” Alvarado said. “As technology changes, as the world changes, as even the various tools that we use to communicate change, we still need individuals who can effectively lead people. So, students come to us because they don't know what they want to do, but they know they want a range of communication skills that are bolstered by an understanding of leadership. Students come to us because they know they want to be lawyers or doctors or entrepreneurs, and that at the core of all of that, they know they must be an effective communicator and an effective leader.”

The interdisciplinary curriculum offers students frameworks and concepts related to leadership, communication, and ethics, along with practical experience applying these skills in the real world through required internships, highlighting the degree’s comprehensive approach to preparing effective leaders. 

Since the program began, approximately 500 students have graduated with a CLD degree. Though the major is small, Tindall says that this plays to student’s advantage, giving them more individual attention and focus.

“Right now, there's about 300 students and there are six to eight faculty depending upon the semester,” Tindall said. “So, you do get to know your students. Faculty can engage with the students at a deeper level so you see them at their best, and sometimes you meet them when they're at their worst, and we work with our students through all those situations to give them the best experience we can. Because that's what we're here to do. I want them to feel recognized, seen and like they are part of something.”

Tindall says she’s excited about the future of the program and continuing to grow the curriculum to fit both the needs of the students and the changing career and technology landscape. She also hopes to continue bringing students and faculty together through events like CLD Week and others that give the students a chance to learn from one another’s experience.

“Some of our students are on wildly different paths so some of them may not interact with each other or even know each other. So how exactly do you get people into a room? How exactly do you help people find each other?” Tindall said. “We're trying to hold events; we're trying to find spaces and ways to bring people together and do some things that help build a culture. We want you to be part of something, but we also want you to learn something when we're together.”

Read the stories of some Moody College's CLD alumni who credit the degree with their personal and professional growth and success.