The School of Communication offers an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in humanistic and behavioral approaches to communication. It provides students with a strong background in a variety of social scientific and historical-critical methods and prepares them to conduct original research in communication.
Graduates seek careers in both academic and non-academic arenas. Students enter the doctoral program with a variety of academic majors and backgrounds in the social sciences, arts and humanities, physical sciences, engineering, or pre-professional studies.
Faculty look for the following qualities in prospective students:
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Intense curiosity about what makes communication work, about the institutional and technological arrangements governing the exchange of information, and about the symbols through which a culture speaks to its members and to outsiders,
- Eagerness to search widely for ideas that help explain communication, and
- Determination to conduct scholarly research.
Students in the doctoral program learn theories that guide research into communication processes and effects and into institutions and technologies that lend pattern to communication. They are expected to acquire and demonstrate humanistic and behavioral knowledge of communication while acquiring skills requisite to scholarly research in the discipline.
For more detailed information, consult the
Doctoral Student Handbook.