Welcome to the Department of Communication Studies. We’re dedicated to explaining how people use communication to exert influence and construct knowledge, identities, relationships, and societies. Here you’ll find exciting courses, motivated professors, and challenging major options that help you build the communication insights, ethics, and skills that give you a big advantage in 21st century life and work.
“Communication” is the key term of the age in which we all live, which increasingly advantages those who can explain and shape communication dynamics in everyday living. Persuasion, leadership, and cultural influence take place in settings ranging from face-to-face negotiation to media outpouring that reaches millions in a moment. As a communication studies major, our programs offer you three unique advantages:
- consistent focus on key leadership abilities,
- access to the best available theory and scholarship on communication processes, and,
- hands-on practice using your growing insights.
Your coursework helps you learn to negotiate and persuade, orally communicate ideas and plans, probe for underlying meanings, teach others, and solve problems in teams, abilities that key success in a wide variety of occupations and settings. Your classes and projects reflect state-of-the-art insight in building and evaluating powerful messages: our program’s unique mix of social science, humanism, and professional training assures you’ll have the insight, abilities, ethical basis, and knowledge employers prize and healthy communities need.
We offer both undergraduate and Masters-level programs of study. Our Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree offers liberal arts concentrations in media studies and journalism. Our Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree program in organizational communication gives more specialized instruction in professional aptitudes associated with workplace and community roles, readying you for skilled work managing human resources, public relations, and other key roles. And our courses in the University’s core curricula develop the interpersonal, speaking, and teamwork facilitation abilities you’ll need to succeed as a student and beyond.
At the graduate level, Communication Studies’ Master of Science (M.S.) program in management communication – offered in cooperation with UP’s Pamplin School of Business Administration – develops students’ professional aptitudes in workplace settings. Our Master of Arts (M.A.) program more broadly enables students to advance their abilities and understandings within a range of rhetorical, journalistic, and organizational communication expertise.
The complexity and challenges of our world demand rigorous preparation, and you’ll find that in your studies here. Our curriculum is led by eight full-time faculty members dedicated to excellence in teaching and mentoring students; each is an active scholar and valued contributor to professional, campus, and community conversations. We’re all devoted to helping you develop the knowledge, ethical foundation, and abilities necessary for success, service, and satisfying living.
We hope you’ll visit to meet our faculty, staff, and students. Please contact our office at (503) 943-7229 or (800) 227-4568 with any questions or requests for more information. We look forward to meeting you.
Cordially,
Jeff Kerssen-Griep
Chair, Communication Studies Department
kerssen@up.edu