Carly's 5 Must-Take Classes in Professional Communication
The Professional Communication (ProCom) program has offered me so many learning opportunities and occasions to apply them practically. Going into the program, I knew I wanted to work in the entertainment industry, but each course in the program can be applied to any field. I have had a great experience in all of my courses, but there are five that have been so interesting that I actively wanted to leave my apartment to attend them.
Language & Power is one of the first required courses a ProCom student will take. Having taken place in the second semester of my first year, the course taught me the basic analytical tools and concepts necessary to break down influential texts like news stories, government policies and more. This class was a great introduction to language rooted in diversity, equity and inclusion, and even offered me the opportunity to perform an in-depth analysis of my own identity! People tend to think that Language & Power only discusses politics, but it has applications in several different fields of communication.
ProCom students can choose a wide variety of courses from the Professional Communication Professional Table I, and Countercultural Communication was definitely one of my favourites. The course touches on what it means to be outside of the mainstream and how alternative communication tactics can help you find a place in the counterculture. From punk music to zines and comic books, I was personally able to analyze how specific tools contribute to rising movements. For the final project, the students were tasked with creating their own countercultural tool, artifact or live event. I was able to create an alternative awards show that highlighted BIPOC communities in film, complete with an event breakdown and press guidelines.
Digital Discourse & Design was another mandatory course for the program. This one though, was based in practice instead of theory. While we still had lectures, the course was mainly taught through workshops and labs that taught us app and website design from ideation to execution. Our final project was to create a website that displayed our personal portfolios, and I still use it to this day on my job applications.
Strategic Public Relations in ProCom (I’ll call it PR for short!) is another Table I course, of which ProCom students have to take eight. I took this one as my first ever Table I option in my second semester at the university. I got to really understand what public relations is, and how it differs from other similar practices like marketing and corporate communications. For our final presentation and report, we were able to choose a PR campaign that we felt was either extremely successful or widely ineffective and break down the reasons why this might be the case. It was a great introduction to an analysis of a case study, which was really helpful for future courses.
Last but certainly not least, Communication and Social Change is also an optional Table I course, and one that I will highly recommend to anyone in the program. Its prerequisites are second and third year courses, so it is designed to be a fourth year seminar course. I personally love it because it is a small class that allows us to actively participate and interact with our professor and classmates that we’ve known since first year. The class takes an in-depth look into the most important social change movements surrounding us today, including Indigenous Truth & Reconciliation, Black Lives Matter, 2SLGBTQIA+ representation in film and TV and much more.
