Communication

Communication envelops our lives - it shapes our ideas and values; gives rise to our politics, consumption, and socialization; and helps to define our identities and realities. Its power and potential is inestimable - from briefest of text messages to the grandest of public declarations, we indeed live within communication and invite you to join us in appreciating its increasing importance in contemporary society. From Twitter and reality television to family relationships and workplace dynamics, communication is about understanding ourselves, our media, our relationships, our culture, and how these things connect.

The Department of Communication invites you to explore these and other related questions. We offer a stimulating undergraduate program that offers a major and minor in communication, and a graduate program that offers an Master of Arts degree in communication. The undergraduate major offers a chance for students to develop their own area of emphasis and select from a wide variety of elective and special course offerings in organizational communication, interpersonal communication, gender and communication, health communication, critical media studies, technology and digital culture, and much, much more.

The Department of Communication is home to a diverse and productive group of scholars/teachers with a broad set of research interests that reflects the most current scholarship in the field of communication. The department sponsors an undergraduate student communication club, Comm.Unity, as well as a chapter of the national Communication Honors Society Lambda Pi Eta. Our faculty participate in a wide-variety of interdisciplinary campus programs and initiatives including Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Ignatian Residential College, the Honors Program, Asian Studies, American Studies, and Service Learning.

Our classes are some of the most popular on campus, and we think you'll agree with a vast majority of employers who routinely cite good communication skills as the number one skill set they look for in future employees. Through our undergraduate course offerings, you'll learn to:

• Recognize the centrality of communication in constructing, sustaining and transforming meaning, identities, relationships, communities, and cultures
• Understand and apply communication theories and concepts to everyday life
• Demonstrate critical thinking and analytical reasoning
• Demonstrate oral and written communication competencies

Fairfield's program prepares you for careers in a variety of communication industries. Each spring the department also hosts career panels in conjunction with Career Planning to help students think through their professional goals.

In addition, communication majors will develop an intensive understanding of the importance of communication in everyday life - both professionally and personally.  Many upper-level students participate in a for-credit internship program that has recently included work experience opportunities at sites such as:

• "The Today Show"
• "The Late Show with David Letterman"
• Polo Ralph Lauren
• Vogue Magazine
• ESPN
• The Special Olympics

In keeping with the University's Jesuit mission, we hope our majors and minors will also develop the skills necessary to make a valuable contribution to their society, and a commitment to influence the media and other organizations to become more just and socially responsible. Our major emphasizes using communication to promote positive social change. We encourage you to develop a global awareness of communication processes, and we strongly suggest:

• Becoming fluent in a second (or third) language
• Taking courses with an international focus
• Planning a study abroad experience

Print a summarized version of our program's overview.