Fall 2012
From the Chair: Alumni set in motion opportunities for students
Job one for faculty and staff in the Department of Communication is to create opportunities for students. These include opportunities for intense learning, for professional growth, for cross-cultural experiences, for innovation. We have found that students will push themselves to new heights when they are challenged with transformational opportunities.
As a professor and Department chair, I thrive on the creation of these moments. I seek to create them when I teach, and we do all we can to support faculty, staff, and students when they develop them. Opportunities are what a great public university is all about.
We have three exciting new developments, created based on feedback from our alumni, I’d like to share with you. I invite you to join other alumni in supporting these opportunities.
1. Weekend in Los Angeles
I will travel with three to five students to Los Angeles in early February for two full days of meetings with Southern California alumni who are leaders in the communication industries. We have set up conversations and hands-on opportunities with alumni in the industries of film, news, public relations, advertising, and non-profit advocacy. The experience will cost $100 per student. The Department — with the help of donors —will pick up the rest of the costs (airfare + lodging + food). Students are applying to be considered for this opportunity right now, and they will be interviewed by a group of faculty and staff, with the most committed and focused being selected. This is an idea that emerged during a campus visit by alum Pete Chiarelli in spring, and all of us — me, students, staff, and everyone else working on this — are excited.
2. Debate program
The former Department of Speech Communication, one of the units upon which the Department of Communication is founded, had a superb debate program for decades. But cutbacks in resources — dollars, people, and space — led to the dissolution of the program in the 1990s. In my time as Chair I have heard alumni talk about the tremendous value of their debate experiences: the scrutinizing of evidence, the crafting of arguments, the need to think quickly and publicly, the professional socialization. I also have talked with faculty member Matt McGarrity, who was a debate coach at Indiana University before joining our faculty to teach public speaking and rhetoric. I have asked Matt to head up the creation of a new debate program. This year we are hosting public debates on campus between civic leaders on issues of the day (marijuana legalization was our topic in October) and next quarter we will begin holding intramural debate competitions among UW students, with McGarrity heading these up. We plan to launch a traveling debate team by 2014-15 that will compete with other colleges around the Northwest. For this enterprise, we will hire a part-time debate coach. Our approach is to foster intellectual excellence while also welcoming all who are interested.
3. Career Kickstart
This is the name of a collection of professional development activities that are being driven and overseen by our Department Alumni Board and Alumni Relations Manager Victoria Sprang. These activities include (a) “Internship Thursdays,” which occur weekly when leaders of local organizations meet with students to talk about internship opportunites; (b) regular mentor lunches, when alums share their stories and do Q and A over sandwiches with a small number of students; (c) monthly special events in which community leaders provide professional tips to students on everything from career directions to resumes to social media to interviewing to finding mentors. We have been building each of these components for several years, but we now have a clear package of connected opportunities. Next up for Career Kickstart is the creation of a formal mentoring program connecting students with alumni.
These kinds of opportunities in the Department of Communication are possible only because of the investments — financial, intellectual, and time — of alumni and supporters. We are committed to a world-class education for our students, and we welcome your support in any way you can imagine. Let’s pay it forward, together.
