2023-2024 Undergraduate & Graduate Catalog
Communication Studies
For additional information about opportunities your college offers, please refer to the School of Communications website.
Website: gvsu.edu/soc
Because our lives -- publicly, privately, and professionally -- vitally depend upon various communication processes, the communication studies major fosters in students a broad-based multidisciplinary orientation, believing that this best prepares them for lifelong learning, promotes professional and personal development, and helps them take fuller ownership of their responsibilities as citizens of local, national, and global communities. Students are brought to understand communication as a practice as well as a reflective inquiry into that practice.
Communication studies stresses fundamental capacities for expression and comprehension, including learning how to analyze difficult texts, articulate nuanced questions, cultivate aesthetic and ethical sensibilities, build persuasive appeals, and develop critical sensitivities to the persuasive appeals of others. The major in communication studies is designed to combine a broad overview of the field of communications with practice in other majors (emphasis areas) in the School of Communications. The aim is for students to become adaptable, artful, resourceful, and generally educated communicators who can draw upon all the ways of looking at communication embodied in and beyond the curriculum.
Internships
The School of Communications faculty believes that an internship can be a significant part of the individual's undergraduate program. Students may elect to take multiple internships. Students are strongly urged to work closely with their faculty advisor or internship coordinator in identifying internships that best suit their interests and career ambitions.
Program Requirements
The following programs are available: