I think I’m really going to like my Communications Theory class. I know, anything with “theory” in the title and it sounds like a snooze-fest, but it’s actually really interesting. What I like about studying communication is that it really just discusses things that you already know, but may have never thought of in a laid-out, academic way. We all can picture how we would act or react in a certain situation, but we may not know why. Communication theory provides ideas of why people do the things they do.

But I won’t bore you with all of the details of the socio-psychological tradition or the differences between objective and interpretive theory. I really just want to talk about my first experience back in the classroom in over five years.
I got to the classroom about 15 minutes early, but I wasn’t the first one there, so that was good! It was nice having just been to orientation with a lot of these people because I felt like I was having class with people I already knew, even if I had just met them briefly once. There are 17 of us in the class, including the professor, and he had us move our desks into a big circle so we could really make the class a big discussion rather than a lecture.

I’m not sure if all of my grad school classes will be like this, but I really do enjoy this format. I think it really is much more conducive to learning and to retaining the information. For this class, our grade is based on our participation in class and in an online forum, on leading the class one week in the discussion and on a final paper. No worrying about learning all of these tiny facts and names, but really focusing on the big picture. But I can tell that I am going to have to be good at staying on top of things. I already have so many things coming up on my calendar over the next few weeks and I’m going to have to set aside time for reading and studying EVERY day. I think that’s going to be the only way to keep it manageable and not be trying to cram all of the reading into one or two nights.
All in all, I think it’s going to be a really good class and a great foundation for the rest of my studies. Now if I can just figure out how to get out of the parking deck without driving in a circles like I did last night…