enough pissing and moaning, I made it official

7 Aug., 2006


Alison Hood, Director
Communications Dept.,
Huntington University
935 Ramsey Lake Rd.
Sudbury, ON P3E-2C6


Dear Mrs. Hood


I am a recent graduate of the four year Communications Degree at Huntington University. During my time studying in this program, I have noted several points that I feel may be helpful for the staff that guide and facilitate the program. I do not mean to suggest that it is currently being run improperly. I understand the program is new and still developing. I offer the following ideas, thoughts and suggestions only in the hope of advancing the program development. It may well be that everything I include here has already been acknowledged, discussed, even acted on.

Perhaps the most important issue I can discern facing the Ba Communications at Huntington is the serious lack of fourth year courses. If one is considering doing studies at a Masters level, they will require a four year (honours) degree. The studies undertaken in classes referenced as fourth year are an important factor for applications committees when considering whether a candidate for higher learning should gain admission to an advanced or graduate program. Without undergraduate courses like this, degree holders from this program (such as myself) will find themselves denied the advancement they seek.

I am not sure of the feasibility of adding core courses to the Communications Program, but hopefully it is a topic that is getting much attention and favour amongst those who decide the structure of the program. Being inter-disclipinary in nature, the program has the potential to allow students to focus on very specific topics, chosen from a wide variety. At the moment there is not much variety at all. The topics in communications appear to be focused already by the previous experience of the professors. This is not all bad, by any means, though the benefit of more options should be clear. I feel this issue is very pressing.

Both of these concerns can be solved by the creation of courses at the fourth year level. Some topics I feel would be especially beneficial to the program are Advanced Linguistics, Semiotics, Corporate Communication and Comparative International Media examining cultural differences and similarities. I believe that a statistics based course, drawing from the disciplines of sociology, psychology and anthropology should be developed to address concerns in Communications Studies - especially the fact that such background tends to be required for research in many humanities-based master's degree programs. Finally, the issue of topical diversity can be easily addressed by development of courses based on directed readings, advanced individual or group studies and projects, thesis development courses and seminar based courses.

In lieu of an expanded repertory of core courses, a solution to subject limitation might be solved by cross-referencing relevant courses from other programs. Perhaps the multi-disciplinary nature of the program and the cost effectiveness of using pre-existing courses for credit in this degree could be an important factor in increasing the scope of studies. There are several relevant courses already offered by Laurentian University that come to mind: Rhetoric (English Dept.), Film Studies (any, English Dept.), Linguistics (Anthropology Dept.) and of course all modern language courses offer obvious crossovers that would require only slight modification to be perfectly suited for this program. Other courses suggest themselves as well, though the idea has been demonstrated.

Some concerns facing the Communications Program are common to all at Laurentian University. I am thinking of a problem that is quite beyond the administration of any one program in itself. I know now that professors and teachers lament elements of the computer system as much as the students do. Nobody can claim it is any small task to maintain such an extensive network. I mention this in the hopes that if enough students and staff voice this concern together, the issues will have to be acknowledged and corrected.

To whit; the interface has become archaic and ineffective, the content is often erroneous and misguiding and (conversely) omissions of important information occur in various sections of webadvisor. Further, there are frequent server crashes. These are serious deficiencies that affect all users in the Laurentian University community. I do not know whether computer services is under-staffed or under-equipped. Perhaps they are simply under-funded and cannot afford to make necessary system changes. Hopefully support from the community will help to bring them the resources they require and deserve.

Naturally, such factors as time, cost and available resources are restrictive factors in implementing large changes such as I have discussed here. It is foolish to effect change without consideration first. I hope the entire Communications Department will consider the issues mentioned in timely manner.

Most of my classes during this program were informative and well delivered. I have been fortunate to enjoy the guidance of excellent professors. The Communications Program at Huntington has plenty of potential, I look forward to seeing the evolution of an excellent program.

Respectfully,
Jason Simac.