Department Unveils New Majors

Graduating with a bachelor's degree in Communications at CSUDH has become a thing of the past.

CSUDH students in the Communications Department will instead now have the option to graduate with either a bachelor's degree in Journalism, Advertising/Public Relations, or Film, Television and Media (FTVM).

The change is in part due to the Communications faculty wanting to revise their former program options to specific majors to better meet the needs of students about to enter a transforming media landscape. Another factor was a CSU Chancellor's office directive that required departments with emphases to have 50% of their courses shared. The Communications Department is also working on getting accredited.

According to Chair of the Communications Department, Dr. Nancy Cheever, having an accredited Communications Department will also make sure that the department is providing the best practices and standards for students. Cheever said this move also allowed the degree programs to offer more direction towards what students will need in their respective fields of interest. For instance, each major will now have fewer core requirements for the entire department and more classes specific to their field of choice.

"I like that the program is more tailored to what I want to do," Journalism major Jordan Darling said. "I like the fact there is a better variety of classes than before that allows me to expand on the skills I will use in my career."

The new degree programs will provide clarification to the education that students are receiving within this department.

"Media studies can be confusing," Dr. Ryan Bowles-Eagle, Assistant Professor in the Communications Department and coordinator of the FTVM degree program, said. The new degree program, FTVM, helps better convey what students will actually be studying and what jobs they could receive coming out of the program.

By splitting the degree programs, there are now lower and upper division and elective specific classes available. This means that instead of having a bunch of common core requirements that everyone in the department must take, they are now classified as lower division courses. Instead of eight common core requirements, there are six lower division requirements. They are all the same between the majors except for COM 250: Writing for the Media, which is shared between Journalism and Advertising/Public Relations, and COM 200: Genre Analysis, which is only required for FTVM majors.

"One thing that changed between all of the options... all of them had a lot more of the same requirements... and less room to devote to requirements just within those options that helped form your expertise in your field and less room where you could explore your area of interest and dive in deeper," Dr. Eagle said.

All the majors will be taking COM 106 and 107: Digital Toolkit. This will teach students skills within the Microsoft and Adobe Suite programs that they will use in future classes.

However, the aim of this class, Dr. Eagle said, is to allow students to not be intimidated by technology that they may encounter in a professional environment.

One of the biggest changes is with COM 490 or the former senior seminar. This will now be a senior project in which students will create a portfolio of work instead of a research paper.

"The goal is for students to gain more tangible skills that are more applicable in the workplace, including creating content using a variety of media programs and platforms, while also developing a digital portfolio they can use to establish their professional presence," said Dr. Burkey, Assistant Professor of Journalism.

Journalism students will be able to take some new electives, including broadcast journalism, sports journalism, entertainment and lifestyle journalism, multimedia interviewing practices, investigative reporting, and digital magazine production.

For Advertising and Public Relations students, the big change comes with the addition of COM 350: Culture, Gender, and Strategic Communications, which is now a required course. They will also be able to take crisis communication, social media strategies, and persuasion as electives.

The FTVM degree program is seeing the most change.

"What do we want our students to graduate with," Dr. Eagle said when asked about how they designed their new degree program. "That's really where we started. What skills, what knowledge do we want our students to graduate with and then we worked backward."

FTVM students are now required to take two film history classes as well a genre analysis class. The genre analysis class is unique because the genre will vary each semester according to what the professor chooses.

The overarching theme of the new FTVM degree program, Dr. Eagle said, is "training our students in digital storytelling."

Students will be able to take a variety of new storytelling classes, including COM 330: Emerging Media Writing.

"Students learn the fundamentals of writing for interactive media, creating decision branching narratives, like if you tried 'Bandersnatch' on Netflix, which is part of the Black Mirror series," Dr. John Vanderhoef, Assistant FTVM Professor in the Communications Department, said.

According to Dr. Cheever, what all of this highlights is that the department now not only offers new classes and specialized degree programs but also the ability for students to concentrate their studies on specific career interests with no limitations on what they can do with any of these degrees.