As Anna McFarland said in her December 2015 article on the Odyssey, Communication Studies is a field where there is a large versatile job market.

When I tell people that I am a Communication Studies major, like most college students, I am asked, “What are you going to do after school?”

However, I am in one of the fields where no one outside of the realm of Communication Studies really knows what it consists of. To clarify, through the program offered at my university, we are able to choose Multimedia Journalism, Strategic Communication and Public Relations, Broadcast Production, and Rhetoric. We are able to concentrate in as many of them as we would like to pursue, if not all of them.

With the required courses in the major, I have taken a class in each of these fields and decided to concentrate on broadcast production and public relations. Will I make the most money out of school? Probably not - there are so many job opportunities thanks to the different aspects of Communication Studies.

A common stereotype of my major at my university is that Communication Studies students are lazy or have little to no work to do; we're just constantly writing papers or do not have as much work as the other majors. However, what people outside of Communication Studies don't know is that some of us our putting our education and skills to use in many different ways.

At my university, the Communications Studies program has a speech and debate team, an FM radio station that reaches our local community, a television studio which produces a weekly magazine show to our local community and a student-run public relations agency that work with real, local clients. All of which are helping us learn better and gives us hands-on experience for after we graduate.

I’m making a point to say how Communications will benefit those of us who chose it as our path of study, especially considering how it's looked at by people outside of it. I am also making a point to explain that it’s not easy work or “lazy,” compared to other majors; it’s just different work than what other majors do. We have a lot of writing and presentations.

Also, all of the papers we're writing are helping us keep up with deadlines in fast-paced work environments, and the group projects are helping us get experience working with others in team atmospheres. In this field, we are all going to have to work with teams at some point, and it's great to work with it now so that we are prepared later.

Now, I am not by any means saying that my major is the hardest or the best. Truthfully, no major is easy because once you keep going, the harder it gets. Communication Studies is just what I realized I wanted to do with my life; it’s something I enjoy and it’s something I understand.