Communications Personal Statement for Graduate Study

As a Communications major as an undergraduate, I frequently found my major scoffed at by both friends and family. People seemed to assume that because they knew how to communicate in their daily lives that they were experts in understanding how the media had an impact upon their lives. They assumed because they know how to write and speak that they were experts in how to deploy the language effectively through verbal and nonverbal means.

However, almost at the end of my course of undergraduate study and hopefully poised upon embarking upon my graduate study, I must beg to differ. Although I was a consumer of various communications media before embarking upon my university career, only through academic study did I become conversant in the different social and linguistic nuances of various communication sources. I am a more critical consumer of the media and hope to help my future students to become one as well.

The multi-disciplinary nature of the communications field continues to intrigue me. I hope to become a 'total' teacher, as I was a 'total' student. I wish to deploy my own experiences, the study of English and sociology, as well as the study of film, television, and radio, to a more effective study of communications in the classroom.

Communications is an evolving and exciting field. What other field combines sociology, written and spoken expression, and attempts to understand the various implications of technical and written media upon the way individuals interact today? Only after academic study did I begun to understand how the way individuals now consume their media through interactive means such as the Internet, has had a profound impact upon the way the media impacts modern life.

Communications is a field with an ever increasing impact upon individual lives, and a more and more diverse impact as to the way individuals perceive themselves in terms of their race, gender and socioeconomic status. What will it mean as more individuals communicate through a media where their race and gender are in doubt, yet they are still bombarded with racially and gender coded advertisements? I hope to ultimately obtain a PhD in Communication Studies and to become a Communications Studies Professor. I wish to bring to my future students a greater understanding of how what they consume in the media, and how they express themselves affects their self-perception.