Communications Studies Program
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What is Communications Studies?
Communications Studies explores the ways in which communication constructs and reflects society and culture. The program emphasizes three interrelated areas of communication:
1) Media and Popular Culture: the theory, criticism and history of communication through traditional media, new media, and popular culture;
2) Rhetorical Communication: the theory, critique and production of informative, persuasive and professional discourse in public and organizational contexts; and
3) Science and Communication: discourses and processes of communication in relation to health, science and technology.
The program aims to educate skilled, flexible and articulate analysts, researchers and practitioners for a wide range of academic, public and professional contexts. It provides graduates with the knowledge, skill and discernment to communicate ideas effectively to a variety of audiences, and to investigate communication in and across a variety of media including speech, writing, television, film, radio, digital media and interactive entertainment, the internet, and wireless networks. Our co-operative education and experiential learning opportunities enable students to develop and apply their skills in non-academic contexts.
Degrees Offered
There are four types of undergraduate degree programs. All but the minor may be taken with cooperative education (co-op).
- Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Communications Studies
- BA Honours in Communications Studies
- Bachelor of Communications Studies (BCS)
- Co-Operative Education (Co-op)
- Minor in Communications Studies
About the Degrees
The program offers two degrees, a four year Bachelor of Arts (BA) and the Bachelor of Communications Studies (BCS) offered in partnership with SAIT Polytechnic. BCS students complete a highly defined set of core communications courses in the first two years of their studies, and transfer to the SAIT campus for their third and fourth years to complete a technical diploma as part of their university degree. The BA offers more opportunities for academic breadth and depth while the BCS offers more training in professional skills to complement your academic experience.
Why Choose the Communications Degree?
Communications Studies offers a mind-expanding, challenging course of study and a means of building up expertise for practical applications and careers. Our core courses provide an understanding of the role of communication in social change over time and across the globe. You’ll grasp an integrated perspective on complex media systems, messages, technologies, audiences, and communication strategies. Your mind will expand as you explore our rich and deep inheritance of communication history and theory. Our programs share intellectual foundations with other well respected North American programs in communication, enabling students to obtain undergraduate transfer credit and pursue graduate studies.
The University of Calgary is an ideal place to study diverse aspects of communication because of its close associations with other programs at the university. In the Department of Communication and Culture, our two sister programs of Film Studies and Science, Technology and Society provide many topics courses and options within the Communications Studies degree. As part of a large and diverse Faculty of Arts, many inspiring degree combinations are possible – combined degrees, double majors, or minors enable you to shape your degree toward communication and the fine arts, communication and politics, communication and international development or economics, or communication and world languages and literatures. Students may also take minors outside our faculty in areas such as Management and Society, a business minor offered by the Haskayne School of Business. Explore the possibilities.
If you pursue an BA Major with Honors, you’ll be able to focus more of your course work on the field of communications studies, and you’ll work with a faculty member on a year-long research project culminating in an honors thesis.
Communications Studies at the University of Calgary offers some attractive professional degree combinations. If you choose the Bachelor of Communications Studies (BCS) degree, you’ll be able to begin or end your studies with a career-related diploma from an approved institution such as SAIT, which counts for almost half of your four-year degree. Our BA Major program is also a recommended foundation for a Master of Architecture from the Faculty of Environmental Design.
By selecting experiential options and co-curricular opportunities, you can develop your career and network by learning through course-based or voluntary communications service for real community organizations or campus units. If you enroll in the co-op program as a BA Major or BCS student, you’ll have the opportunity to apply your knowledge to degree-related employment. Short-term communications projects involving research, writing, community service placements, or event planning are a part of several courses, enabling you to build up experience in team communication and project management.
What Can You Do With Your Degree
Graduates have gone into careers in the following areas:
- Editor
- English as a Second Language Instructor
- External Communications Officer
- Marketing Coordinator
- Media Buyer
- Policy Analyst
- Public Relations Professional
- Publicity Assistant
- Staff Writer
- Technical Writer
- Volunteer Coordinator
- Website Administrator
Our programs in Communications Studies prepare graduates for a wide variety of communications professions, careers, and roles.
In general, our graduates can meet twenty-first century communication challenges and issues with confidence and creativity. They have sharpened their advanced skills in the arts of writing, speaking, and academic and professional communication so that they can produce high quality messages in a variety of media. They are able to adapt to a wide variety of communication situations. They know how to inquire deeply into an issue’s or organization’s history and current opportunities and limitations in order to provide timely communications insight and expertise.
If you wish to focus your career on crafting and managing communications, you can become a communications workers in one of a large variety of organizations where your position may involve creating newsletters or online content, writing annual reports or grant applications, writing media releases, or managing content and processes for a company’s internal networks or external media. Communications graduates may also become organizational editors and technical writers who write instructions on the use of technologies, or who collaborate with experts to edit policy and procedures manuals.
Communicators may also take up roles in traditional media and new media industries: in newspapers, publishing companies, radio and television stations, or online gaming and technology companies. Access to these roles can be enhanced by an approved professional diploma built into a Bachelor of Communications Studies, a co-op degree, an undergraduate degree with an additional certificate or diploma, or extensive work and volunteer experience in the industry.
Some Communications Studies graduates may move on to pursue professional after-degree or graduate programs in areas such as Law, Education, or Architecture. Their program websites or staff will tell you what they are looking for in an undergraduate degree as preparation for their programs. Communication knowledge and skill is especially valuable as a foundation for legal studies. Legal workers and lawyers need to be adept with textual research and analysis, oral and written argumentation, and have a big-picture understanding of social and political contexts and effects of communication.
As communicators move on in their careers, having an undergraduate degree that can support or lead into a master’s degree can be a powerful asset. Communications management roles are often taken on by communicators with master’s degrees, sometimes begun years after graduation from a BA Major or Honors program. Your four-year BA is also the first step toward academic master’s and doctoral degrees required for positions as high-level researchers, analysts, and professors and postsecondary teachers in communication and related areas of inquiry.
However, a very important element of your University of Calgary degree is that you won’t be limited to careers with job titles that have the word “communication” in them. This is where it becomes valuable to have more than just career-specific skills and knowledge such as a program in journalism, broadcasting, or professional writing. If you can think beyond existing communication roles and processes, you’ll be able to grow and advance in your career and adapt to a wide variety of industries and responsibilities. A communications studies degree helps you think deeply and critically about the various communicative aspects of your industry or organization – its history, its relation to society, culture, technology, and the creative arts – areas covered by options courses as well as your required communication courses. These subjects are part of the intellectual equipment for twentieth-century life that will set you above the crowd in your ability to understand, discern, explain, and propose better ways of doing things.
Student Experience
FIRST YEAR EXPERIENCE
In your first year, whether fresh from high school or transferring from another degree program, you’ll join other communications students in taking our introductory communication course, and you’ll explore other first-year courses offered by Arts and Science faculties. Our COMS 201 course, like many other first-year courses, breaks up a large class into smaller groups that meet in weekly tutorials. These are led by teaching assistants who lead discussions and explain more deeply what should be learned through lectures and readings.
Two of our courses are well known to be life-changing, highly engaging, and very intellectually challenging: General Studies 300 and 500 are core courses that delve into the history of western thought as well as some other global cultures. They are very interactive and encourage integration of what you learn through readings with what you think, believe, and experience as a person living in Canada in the twenty-first century. When these courses are offered in large lectures, they always have small tutorial sections and often have fellow students serving as “peer mentors” who have enjoyed the class so much that they come back to enhance the learning experience for you.
Three other courses are required for most COMS degree programs and are taken early in the degree: COMS 369 Rhetorical Communication introduces the rhetorical principles of effective informative and persuasive communication for public contexts, and it is offered in small classes of 30 students where you practice writing and speaking. COMS 371 Critical Media Studies engages you in understanding media theories and how they relate to our social world and contemporary communications and media, and COMS 381 Communications History focuses on how communication methods emerge, transformed, and adapted over centuries.
Beyond these courses are a wide variety of intermediate and advanced COMS options courses that focus on our areas of emphasis in media and popular culture; rhetoric, writing and professional communication; and science communication. All FILM and STAS courses can also be counted as options within the BA Major.
If you are a Bachelor of Communications Studies student, you’ll take required university classes with your peers at various stages in their degree program; some will be taking courses at the university before enrolling in an approved diploma program as part of the degree, while others will have already finished their diploma program.
In your final years all majors will take a capstone course: BA Major students will take a research-based capstone half-course that encourages you to integrate your knowledge across the various areas of communications and what you’ve learned in other courses in your degree. Bachelor of Communications students will enroll in a year-long course offered at SAIT that involves faculty mentorship in a practical communications project that may also involve research.
The Communications Studies program also enables students to set up a directed study course with a professor who serves voluntarily to guide your study of a topic of shared interest through GNST 501; if this interests you, you’ll need to approach a professor in advance and make arrangements.
HONOURS
If your grades and courses enable you to qualify and enroll in a BA Major with Honors, you’ll be placed in a full-year seminar course with all other students pursuing an honors degree, you’ll work closely with a faculty supervisor on a research project that culminates in an honors thesis, and you will have a final oral examination with your supervisor and two other faculty members. This experience upgrades your BA degree and provides a solid foundation for graduate degrees.
CO-OP
The co-op program enables you to graduate with a degree designation that highlights cooperative education. Arts co-op office staff will help you find communications related employment placements in organizations that qualify for the cooperative program, and you’ll take “work terms” that enhance your degree.
COMS CLUBS
Communications Studies students have in the past formed clubs such as the Students In Communications or [sic] club, and these clubs provided career networking events and dinners. They have also built links by making their club affiliated as a student chapter of communications associations like the International Association of Business Communicators, Society for Technical Communication, and other associations with professional and academic connections in the communications world. Club executives can arrange for credit on the co-curricular record that accompanies your transcript. Other student-run clubs registered with the Student’s Union may also involve communications roles like planning events and fundraising campaigns, and these roles can enhance your resume.
Students in our degree program often volunteer for on-campus organizations such as the student newspaper The Gauntlet, non-profit campus broadcasting organizations NUTV and CJSW radio. We have also launched a ComCul undergraduate programs blog and related Facebook page that communicates with new and current students, alumni, faculty, and community contacts. This initiative offers undergraduate volunteer positions as editors, journalists, and media team leaders.
EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING
Experiential learning in Communications Studies often involves projects and experiences within credit courses as well. Some of our special topics courses like Food Culture course and Acoustic Ecology course involve field trips to collect data and experience communication in everyday settings.
Service-learning is another type of experiential learning that is quite intensive and practical; it involves serving a real organization, often as a team of students, while linking your service to academic readings and lectures through reflective writing and discussions. Service-learning may be a required component of COMS 407 Experiential Learning in Communications and COMS 463 Rhetoric and Professional Communication and may be an option in some sections of GNST 313 Interdisiciplinary Research Methodologies and GNST 500 Heritage II: Integration. Contact the university’s Center for Community Engaged Learning to find out about other course-based and co-curricular service learning opportunities.
All students in their later years may apply for another unique experience: the curricular peer mentoring program. This experience is offered through the GNST/ARTS 507 and 509 interdisciplinary option courses. It is especially attractive to students in communications studies because it involves communication skills, roles, and challenges and may involve a placement in a communications course. Peer mentoring involves returning to any course you’ve really enjoyed and working under the supervision of its professor as you serve a few hours per week as a mentor, offering course-related activities and encouragement to the students enrolled in that course. As you do so, you’ll have the support of a mentoring instructor and up to fifteen other peer mentors enrolled in the seminar. If you do well, you may be invited to return another term and take GNST 509.
STUDENT SUPPORT
Finally, it is worth mentioning that our friendly staff and administrators in Social Sciences 320 are available to answer your questions and hear any concerns. In addition, undergraduate students in our department also have access to a semi-public lounge room on the third floor where you can study or catch a nap (if it’s quiet enough), eat your lunch, and meet other communication and culture students.
Research Areas
Many of the teachers of our Communications Studies courses are also active as scholars and researchers in specific areas of communication, especially those in positions designated as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor. Regardless of their position category, all our professors and instructors have graduate degree backgrounds and are actively engaged in keeping up with recent developments and publications in their fields of study.
Our faculty members bring their research expertise to the classroom when they teach. Students benefit from the fresh insights and advanced skills of scholars who are active in building new knowledge in the area. Many of our faculty members teach our graduate-level courses and supervise master’s and doctoral students, and may be involved in local, national, and international scholarly associations and collaborative research projects. Professors occasionally supervise undergraduate students on student-driven research projects through the COMS 501 directed studies course and the GNST 590 honors thesis course. In addition, when professors are working on a research project, if there are no appropriate graduate students who can assist with certain research tasks they may employ or invite volunteer assistance from undergraduate students.
You’ll find a list of their research interests and information about some of their recent publications and activities in their profiles on the department’s website. Here are a few examples.
- Maria Bakardjieva researches computer mediated communication, internet use, media and democracy, new media and society, and social aspects of communication technology. She occasionally teaches COMS 481 Advanced Topics in New Media and Society.
- Brian Rusted studies organizational culture, ethnography, performance studies and visual culture and often teaches COMS 371 Critical Media Studies and COMS 473 Popular Culture.
- Doug Brent examines rhetoric and composition, postsecondary education practices, and writing in the disciplines. He frequently teaches COMS 363 Professional and Technical Communication, COMS 369 Rhetorical Communication and COMS 381 Communications History.
- Tania Smith researches professional communication, rhetorical theory and practice, community-university partnerships and higher education innovation and leadership. She occasionally teaches COMS 463 Rhetoric and Professional Communication and GNST 313 Interdisciplinary Research Methodologies.
Scholarship Information
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Arts and Sciences Honors Academy (ASHA) program
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Have More Questions?
For comprehensive advising on your program of studies, contact:
Student Success Centre
3rd Floor, Taylor Family Digital Library
(403) 220-5881
http://www.ucalgary.ca/ssc/
For more details on the Communications Studies program, contact
Dawn Johnston
Program Co-ordinator
Phone: (403) 220-3199
Email: debjohns@ucalgary.ca
For more course information visit the University Calendar.