What it means to be a Communication major at SNC – Being a Communication major student means that you want to learn about all of the different forms of communication there are in the world. You want to learn about how to interact effectively with people both one-on-one, and in a group setting. You want to learn how to speak clearly during lectures and while giving presentations. All of the things you learn while taking these courses will assist you as you pursue many different careers. For me personally, I feel like by taking these Communication courses I learned how to communicate with different types of people and how you should talk to people of a higher authority in a works setting differently than how you would talk with your friends and family. I also learned about how to read people better using nonverbal cues which helps me understand how people are feeling at the time even if they are not saying how they really feel.
Areas of discipline I specialized in – The majority of my classes had an emphasis in the media studies portion of the major. Most of my classes dealt with social scientific research, with a few focusing more on critical research. The social scientific topics that were researched were mostly social, educational and some political purposes. The critical research focused more on some feminism and racial topics on how everyone has different views and values that other people need to learn how to respect and embrace within their own lives.
What I am interested in pursuing after college – I am interested in working in a privacy field after college. I am currently working as a privacy analyst for a home health agency and I am in charge of working with a program called Protenus. My main job is to use this program and create cases when the program identifies possible employee access to patient information that may indicate an employee committed a privacy breach or policy violation. The employee may have looked at medical record documentation for patients that they should not be looking at, whether it be family, friends or other patients they are not assigned to.
Other experiences that have helped me outside the classroom – Outside of the classroom this internship I am currently in with a home health agency has helped me learn new skills that will help me later in life. By learning how to use programs, such as Protenus, it helps set me up for future jobs where I will have more experience than others that may be trying to apply for the same job. I also am learning how to send emails to people after they have committed acts that go against the company policy and how I can show them where they went wrong while also showing them how to not make the same mistake again in the future. Many of the people I talk to in this internship, about their employee privacy breaches, are managers and directors who are older and have more years of work experience than I do. I learned to talk to them in a professional manner different than how I would communicate with my peers.
