What You Will Study. How You Will Learn.
Students advancing through the Communication Studies degree plan obtain a broad range of skills. By understanding how communication works in any setting and circumstance, you sharpen performance skills, as well as skills of analysis and understanding.
Coursework focuses on the study of communication and relationships, and specialty tracks in corporate, interpersonal or political communication are available.
Curriculum Overview
The Bachelor of Science in Communication Studies degree comprises 120 credit hours, and 36 hours of major-specific coursework are required. To learn more, please review the degree requirements or consult the degree checklist.
Required Classes
- Professional Communication Skills: Plan and prepare professional meetings and presentations, deliver a well-organized speech, analyze different audiences and adapt to speaking situations, purposes and contexts
- Theories of Persuasion: Identify persuasion as a strategic process and consider its application in various contexts
- Career Prep: Seek an internship opportunity to align skills and professional interests, or consider a class that translates to workplace situations like ethical decision-making
- Methods: Hone research as a valuable skill that translates to any enterprise
Tracks
Study relationships of organizations and the components of healthy dialogue in one-to-one and group settings. By examining the complexities of human interactions within organizations, students are equipped to work in sales, consulting or team training.
Required Class
- Organizational Communications: Study how people accomplish goals through the creation and exchange of messages within a network. Examine communication practices within organizations like Apple, Disney and IBM
Identify strengths and skills with complementary course options, such as:
- Strategic Sales and Event Planning: Develop comprehensive understanding of the process of planning and executing large, public-scale events
- Communicating to Build Sales Relationships: Establish a solid foundation in developing long-term, trusting client relationships, including prospecting, assessing client needs, closing and presenting
Explore intimate one-on-one relationships, such as the family construct, and how communication is essential to developing healthy relationships.
Required Class
- Interpersonal Communication Theory: Focusing on the role of communication in relationships, students demonstrate techniques that include: how to deal with rumor and gossip, how to increase charisma, how to manage long-distance relationships and how to effectively self-disclose to others
Identify strengths and skills with complementary course options, such as:
- Conflict Mediation: Hands-on training and practice in conflict intervention techniques, including mediation, facilitation and dialogue
- Lying and Deception: Explore varieties of deceptive communication, their causes and consequences in a wide-range of contexts. Develop strategies to detect deception
- Nonverbal Communication: Understand the channels of nonverbal communication and how communicators and their environment influence nonverbal behaviors in relationships
Understand rhetorical theories on a wide-ranging cultural level. Students advance to work as speechwriters, campaign managers, lobbyists and communications officers for public-facing entities, or gain tools to succeed in law school or advanced study.
Required Class
- Speech in American Culture: Explore how speechmaking has shaped United States politics and culture from 1776 to present
Identify strengths and skills with complementary course options, such as:
- Leadership and Public Memory: Examine how commemorations, public speeches, museum exhibits, historic sites and monuments create and shape public memory
- Rhetoric of Popular Culture: Understand public messages, such as speeches or political appeals, and skillfully analyze communication events