Communication department offers five new degrees
Communication students have two years to switch or complete current major
Students will choose from among five communication degrees, instead of only two, beginning in fall 2006.
On Jan. 19, the State Board of Higher Education approved five new bachelor’s degree programs in the department of communication, eliminating the current mass communication and speech communication choices.
The programs include: management communication; journalism, broadcasting and mass communication technologies; health communication; public relations and advertising; and agricultural communication.
Students with either mass communication or speech communication majors have two years to either switch to one of the new majors or complete their current majors. They can major and/or minor in any of the five areas.
“ I think students are going to like that there are more specializations,” Paul Nelson, professor and chair of the communication department, said. “They probably already have a specialization in mind, so it’s not going to be a hard choice, and it’s probably going to be an attractive choice.”
The route to the new majors began about two years ago.
“ It took about a year to write and another year to get through all the hoops,” Nelson said.
A team of people, including communication professors Robert Littlefield, Michelle Shumate and Amy O’Connor, worked on writing the proposal and moving it through the approval process.
The programs are the first step in establishing a school of communication at NDSU, Nelson said.
“ (A school) would give us some prestige we wouldn’t have otherwise,” Nelson said. “It also helps attract students, and it might help attract resources as well.”
The school would remain within the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, he said.
Mass communication, speech communication and theater arts majors have been offered at NDSU since 1984, Robert Littlefield, professor of communication, said.
“ Before that time, it was called ‘speech and drama,’” Littlefield said. “And communication couldn’t be a primary major.”
As the field of communication has grown, so have particular specializations at NDSU.
“ We guess that PR and advertising will be our biggest number (of students),” Nelson said. “Even now with mass communication, two-thirds of those mass communication people are PR.”
Beginning in the fall, an introductory course will be offered for each new program, instead of the current two introductory courses.
“ We’ll start with the introductory courses and feed in year by year,” Nelson said. “We don’t have to have the whole house built in year one.”