In my senior year of high school, I was interviewed by the local newspaper about my achievements in high school journalism. When asked what I planned to study at UM, I shared that I would major in journalism and expressed my excitement about the increased writing opportunities ahead.
The interviewer quite literally laughed in my face.
He told me that journalism was a dying art and my dreams of working for a newspaper were “cute’ but dumb.” It made me think: If this is what people in my own field think about journalism majors, what do other people think?
If you search “communication major” on TikTok, you’ll come across dozens of hateful videos. These critiques frequently reduce the field to nothing more than talking, implying that our work is easy. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
“People make simplistic judgments about things that most times are inaccurate. A lot of people in education don’t know or understand what it is that we do,” said Dr. Mitchell Shaprio, the director of the School of Communication honors program.
As a freshman journalism and advertising management major, juggling school work with extracurricular student media work like pending newspaper deadlines and hunting down photos for yearbook spreads is not as easy as it’s made out to be. The notion that “all we do is talk” only covers a small percentage of what our typical daily workload looks like.
Many of these false narratives derive from social media interview videos. These interviewers commonly ask college students what the easiest or dumbest major is, and a large percentage answer with “communications.”
Communication majors have a different workload compared to typical students. Instead of the typical tests and quizzes, which aren’t completely off the table, most of our work consists of big projects. Whether we’re creating a full public relations campaign to tackle a company crisis, developing an integrated advertising campaign, producing a short film, editing a news package or just writing a detailed article, these projects often require long-term planning to encompass hours of filming, editing, interviewing and writing.
“When people say that communication majors have it easy in school it makes me feel upset because it’s a different kind of hard work than people typically think of,” said Noa Friedman Lowenthal, a freshman public relations major. “Yes, we aren’t answering multivariable calculus questions, but there is pressure to be a creative critical thinker, and that most definitely requires a strong work ethic.”
For a skill that is supposedly “easy,” many people in the workforce lack the ability to effectively communicate. A 2016 study by PayScale found that 44% of managers in the workforce feel that recent college graduates lack skills in writing proficiency. In a more recent poll, 70% of CEOs on Long Island, NY, expressed that they felt job applicants have poor writing skills.
Communication-related jobs are vital to almost every single company. Without an advertising or public relations team, companies would struggle to build their brand, market their products and effectively communicate with consumers. Journalism ensures that the public stays informed, while fields like media management and cinematography play a role in building an audience.
So, before you label communications as easy, consider the typical college student’s dependence on tools such as ChatGPT and Grammarly. If writing is so easy, why are you ChatGPT-ing your essay? You might call yourself a designer for editing a Canva template, but it’s nothing like fighting for your life when you lose your linked documents on an InDesign assignment.
At the end of the day, every major has its own unique set of challenges. Not everything has to be a competition. We’re all just trying to get our education. Dismissing an entire field of study based on unfair and inaccurate stereotypes is narrow-minded and ignorant. Communication is what connects people, industries and ideas. Without it, society wouldn’t function as we know it.