Welcome Back!
CMS Undergraduate Students,
Welcome (back) to UT and to Communication Studies! Regardless of whether you’re just arriving or returning for your final year, I suspect we can all agree that you’ve made a great choice to be part of this community.
Whether your classes are in person, online, or some mix of the above, you are still going to be taking classes from a world-class faculty that has thought carefully about how to effectively engage you regardless of delivery format. As communication studies students, it is also your responsibility to communicate with us about your needs and concerns—and I think when you do that you’ll find us very flexible and reasonable. I also want to remind you that you will still be making strong progress toward your degree—a degree the Princeton Review recently ranked as the second best college major based on jobs, salaries, and student popularity (https://www.princetonreview.com/college-advice/top-ten-college-majors).
We also have some exciting new things in place for you this year:
- Most notably, we’ve started two new student organizations: a Lambda Pi Eta Honors Society for qualified individuals and our student chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators (open to anyone). You’ll be hearing more about them in the coming days.
- We’ve also hired two new faculty this year in Interpersonal Communication in addition to the two new faculty hired last year (in the Political and Corporate Communication areas). So, keep an eye out this year for new courses on things like Environmental Communication, Communication Research Methods (with a QR flag), the Dark Side of Interpersonal Communication, and the Dark Side of Organizational Communication.
- Our relatively new UT-New York program (directed by a CMS faculty member!) is now fully up and going—and could be a wonderful opportunity especially for those of you in corporate and political communication. See the Moody website for more details.
- This coming spring, we plan to have our first Comm Studies Week, which will be filled with events/activities for current, former, and prospective students. More details to come…
So, I hope even amid some of the current uncertainty that you are as excited about the upcoming year as I am. On behalf of the entire department, I hope you have a great semester and I look forward to eventually meeting some of you throughout the year!
Craig
Craig R. Scott, Ph.D. (he/him/his)
John T. Jones, Jr. Centennial Professor
Chair, Department of Communication Studies
