BA: Communication

The department’s undergraduate courses approach communication as a liberal art that blends theory, analysis and practice and cuts across the humanities and social sciences.

These courses provide students with the resources to understand how communication processes create our social worlds, the abilities to analyze those processes and the practical skills to communicate in their professional, personal and civic lives.

The Bachelor of Arts in Communication provides the intellectual and practical skills to understand communication as both a way of seeing how the world works and as a set of tools for changing it.

The BA in Communication provides a broad-based liberal arts degree designed to foster students’ abilities to understand, analyze, and effectively engage in a wide range of communication practices. It fosters critical thinking about the ways that symbols and interactions contribute to social problems and solutions to them, to identities and differences, to organizations and work, to personal relationships and groups and to experience and meaning across cultural settings.

At the same time, the major provides instruction and practice in the skills of effective communication and collaborative problem-solving that employers are looking for—speaking, writing, reading, listening, asking good questions, utilizing media and working in groups. The mix of theory and practice gives students the tools to improve communication performance and critical awareness of it across many situations.