The Dean’s Corner

THE DEAN’S

Corner

Dr. Virginia McDermott

Dean of the School of Communication

The Princeton Review recognized the Nido R. Qubein School of Communication (NQSC) as a top program for communication professionals. The NQSC is an engaged and interactive community of more than 800 student scholars and producers in eight (soon to be ten) undergraduate majors and one (soon to be two) graduate degrees. The mission of the NQSC is to balance theory and application courses in a multidisciplinary environment, enabling students and faculty to think, speak, write and produce strategic messages about a broad range of ideas and issues. The NQSC is committed to: (a) collaboration between students and faculty in and out of the classroom; (b) independent thought and critical thinking that produces ethically aware, historically informed and socially engaged citizens prepared for leadership in the global community; (c) culturally diverse teambased learning experiences; and (d) a universal right to creative expression.

The faculty and staff of the NQSC combine traditional liberal arts education with application in the profession. We have created and refined the curriculum and experiential opportunities to prepare students to become industry and community leaders and engaged citizens. Whether it is developing a campaign to promote regular exercise, managing a sports venue, planning a corporate event, announcing an athletic event, producing a broadcast or multimedia news story, developing the narrative arc of a video game or producing a video documentary, graduates of the NQSC prosper in an economy that values information, effective management of resources and entertainment sharing.

Communication is a discipline in which change is the norm, so the faculty must adapt to the constant change in tastes, trends and technology. Our faculty, which includes Emmy and Fulbright winners, is extraordinarily active in their fields, traveling the world to research, produce and present their work. We pride ourselves in providing close interaction among students and faculty, small classes, and opportunities for undergraduate research and creative work. Our students work as independent consultants or in teams to provide services for small and large clients who want to reach audiences with messages. Many of our classes offer students the opportunity to conduct academic research, where students sign up to work with a faculty member throughout the semester on his or her research project and travel with them to conferences related to creative works projects in areas such as

game design, video production and journalism. Undergraduate and graduate students also get the opportunity to work on academic research outside of the classroom. For example, five communication students are currently working with a faculty member in strategic communication on a research project on behalf of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. The NQSC students are encouraged to be part of real-world experiences as a way to prepare them for the job market. One example of this is the school’s Bateman team, which is one of more than 75 teams across the nation, where students research, organize and execute a public-relations campaign for a specific client assigned annually by the Public Relations Student Society of America.

Central to all our majors is the ability to write clearly and with purpose and to express oneself in various other means to an audience. These skills have helped our students secure jobs and internships with Google, People Magazine, the NBA and WNBA, the Washington Team, Ogilvy Mather, Chanel, MGM Resorts-Las Vegas, MTV Networks, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, WCVB-Boston, ABC-New York, Fox News Channel, the Huffington Post, Madison Square Garden and Make-a-Wish Foundation. These communication skills have also helped students win seats at top-choice graduate schools, such as the University of Southern California, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, New York University and Boston University.

The NQSC offers an ideal setting for integrating the practice and study of communication and experience management. There are few higher education institutions in the country with the comparable range and quality of the school’s facility or production equipment. The school, which was established in 2008, moved into a 60,000-square-foot building in 2009 and has continued to enjoy new additions and updated equipment distributed throughout its classrooms and production facilities. In the summer of 2019, the school added two new spaces. The Miriam and Steve Kimsey Game and Interactive Media Lab was renovated and now houses three unique spaces for students: an esports arena, a design/ makerspace, and a game and interactive media computer lab. The second space added is the BEACON Lab, which is an acronym for Biometric

Evaluation, Analytics, Cognitive Observation and Neuromarketing. Marketing and strategic communication students will learn to use the latest software to test consumer responses to advertisements, campaign messages, debate performances, and a variety of promotional and media messages.

It is important that our students have familiarity with the latest technology, but it is just as important that they understand how humans communicate with each other in the most effective manner. Our program is proud to encourage the ethical and socially conscious involvement of students, never forgetting how individual creativity can interact with and enhance the broader social community. We encourage this through a variety of means. Our school has a number of professionals in residence, such as American sportswriter Bob Ryan, ABC news anchor Byron Pitts and CEO of the Dallas Mavericks Cynt Marshall. Each semester these experts conduct media panels, visit classrooms and give talks. Additionally, our students are also learning how to communicate with the broader community via our study abroad courses. We currently offer a gaming course where students spend two weeks in Japan and a strategic communication course that allows students to visit local businesses in Italy. These are valuable learning experiences that offer students the opportunity to communicate with people from diverse cultures and gain an understanding of other societies.

The NQSC embeds public service as a component in many of its courses. Much of the program’s curricular-based public service is affiliated with the university’s Service Learning Program, whose mission is to “engage students in an experiential and interdisciplinary learning environment that promotes their understanding of and commitment to responsible civic leadership.” Faculty create service learning courses that apply classroom The NQSC faculty’s public service activities are varied. They contribute time and energy to several local public service organizations in the community, ranging from the High Point Community Foundation to High Point Center for Children and Families, from the High Point Food Alliance to the High Point Chamber of Commerce and from the YWCA to the Triad Area Film Commission.

As might be expected, one group that faculty have also connected with in the local area is the arts community. Faculty sit on the board of the High Point Arts Council and have provided assistance with marketing campaigns, have acted as judges and ambassadors for numerous film festivals, and have made presentations to aspiring film makers.

The value of a liberal arts education has been questioned for the last few years, and numerous articles and opinion pieces have been written defending its tradition and place in the 21st century. A liberal arts education has been termed a “pathway to intellectual freedom” and lauded for “promoting freedom of thought, expression and inquiry… necessary for developing an engaged citizenry.” These are good arguments, but, to me, these arguments miss the most important element of a liberal arts education — it gives us a vocabulary. This vocabulary is enhanced by studying different academic traditions and allows us to talk to people of different backgrounds and different perspectives. A commonality among the diverse majors in the NQSC is that they all provide students the tools to use this vocabulary to communicate clearly with others, an essential requirement for most employers nowadays.

In the communication discipline, we tell stories. The stories might appear in newspaper articles, be woven into the promotional material of a new organization, experienced in the arc of a video game or a planned event, or viewed in a film.

But all of these stories are designed to connect us and that connection requires that we have the vocabulary to hear others and give voice to their stories. To develop this vocabulary, we need to explore the history and literature of different groups and different times. We need to know about science and music, business and art. A liberal arts education provides different intellectual lenses that allow us to view others’ worlds and experience others’ journeys.

Every day, our world gets smaller and more interconnected. With the ease of travel, the swift change in technology and the increased use of social media, communication across cultures is increasingly becoming the norm. The Nido R. Qubein School of Communication prepares our students to be better communicators in such a globally interconnected world. With our strong emphasis on technology, social media, written and spoken communication as well as our attention to diversity and real-world applications, we strive to equip our students with the necessary communication skills that can help them achieve extraordinary goals and interact with diverse people across the globe using various means of communication. ❧