This is a summary of my time spent at St. Norbert College in the commuincations department.
Being a communication/media studies major at St. Norbert has shown me a lot of things. It shows you the ins and outs of how communication works from all different aspects. It could be from a network/social media aspect, an interpersonal/relational level, political, intercultural, and even your own family. At St. Norbert, I did not just take communication courses that related to media. I also took courses that taught me how people communicate with each other on a personal level and how people form strong relationships with one another. I found these courses actually very interesting because I had never learned anything like that before. I think that is what it means to be a communication major at St. Norbert. You have to widen your mind and look at new ways of thinking and use theoretical thinking in order to make sense of what is going on in the world/media but also in our personal lives with our relationships with friends and family.
Opening your way of thinking, especially in the communication atmosphere, makes a big difference. In doing so, I was able to learn many things from both realms of communication. In interpersonal relationships, there are many different things happening that most people would not even think about. For example, there are tons of nonverbal cues during conversation that most people do not even pick up on. At first, I thought it was all a theory and then during my next conversation I had with someone it occured to me that all these things do happen. There are so many things that take place in interpersonal communication that most people don’t even pick up on. From an intercultural standpoint, something I learned is that our use of gestures widely vary across cultures. In the US, our use of the “thumbs up” is saying good job or nice work. In another culture it can mean that I want to fight or like giving someone the middle finger. What occured to me after learning that is that do all the exchange students see us make these gestures everyday and think to themselves, “these americans are crazy do they always want to fight each other..”
From a media standpoint, there are so many things I learned on how we study and make sense of what is going on in the media, I had no idea so many theories could exist. One of them that I took away would be the knowledge gap theory. People who are not of the same socioeconomic status than others may not have access to the internet or the media. In other words they are less informed than other people because they are not able to see the content that people of higher status are. This plays a major role whether it be in a political atmosphere or even just watching the news. Some people are not as informed as others and it could put them at high risk. Also what I found interesting was how the newspaper writes stories. During my Writing for Media course, I learned how news stories are trimmed down and the format that must be used in order to catch readers’ eyes. It could be through digital news or a print copy but depending on the story the format varies. For example in a story that is not major, you have to take all the information given and trim it down into about 2-3 paragraphs consisting of about 2 sentences each. It was an eye opening experience because I had absolutely no idea how any of that worked. Overall, I learned a lot of cool and interesting things in the communications department that I believe will help me majorly in both my career and my personal life. Having that knowledge on how the media and social networking works will be able to help me decipher what is factual and what is not. I will also be able to conduct research on how I will be able to help the company that I will be working for and find new dynamics on how to sell products in large quantities. And having the knowledge of interpersonal relationships and how to effectively communicate with people, I will be able to make strong relations/partners with other members from different companies and be able to hopefully expand business further.
What I plan to do after graduation is hopefully get a job with a company such as Bass Pro Shops/Cabelas or another outdoor type company and be a part of their sales or marketing unit. I would enjoy working for a company of that nature because the outdoors is my passion and that is the kind of company I would like to help and possibly expand. Another idea I had was going into the trucking/freight business. The reason I have been kicking around this idea is because my dad is a half owner of a small trucking brokerage in my home town and I have seen over the years how hard he worked to get that up and running. If I can keep that company in the family I would be more than happy to but I want to go out and get some experience in that field on my own and having him to help would be a good resource.
