All majors are hard. Whether it’s English, chemistry, business, psychology or communications, it’s hard. If it were easy, you wouldn’t have to go to college to learn it.
About a week ago, I was particularly offended by someone who made a remark about how my major was “easy.” Since I wasn’t in the greatest of moods, I used a bit more of a colorful vocabulary than I’ll be using now, but here is a general gist of what I said.
Just because I don’t have to go to several labs throughout the course of my college career, does not mean I’m not working my tail off every single day.
Very few people know what the communication arts are. At least that’s what I’ve gathered from the several blank stares I receive at the mention of the concept.
For those who don’t know, communication arts involve everything from news distribution to media marketing to video production. If you want to get a job when you graduate you need to be well-rounded in all of that.
This mindset of an “easy” major also applies to people who are communication arts, theater, and theater and communication arts majors – I know this because the required classes often overlap. People have this idea that a major that involves theater means classes just involve reading scripts all day and journalism communications majors write essays all the time.
Just as a warning, don’t ever go up to someone who’s a theater major and say public speaking must be easy for them or up to a journalism/communications major and say essay writing must be really easy for them.
Aside from the fact that most of these assumptions are false, when people assume that our major is “easy,” it’s really frustrating. Not only have most of the people not been in a single communications major-related class, they don’t even think about half the things people in our major are involved with outside of class.
People in these majors are involved with experiential learning every day. This includes writing and editing for The Gannon Knight, writing and editing for Edge, working on staff and disc jockeying for the radio station, and acting in and producing shows at the Schuster Theatre, just to name a few.
There are some people who are involved in every single one of these and more. All of the work we do goes into a portfolio that is used as a basis for whether we are hired post-graduation.
Add classes, homework and the stress that a potential employer will be looking at all of these things in a few years, and then say that these majors are easy.
Honestly, I’ve heard several people say things about non-science majors that imply that they’re not as hard or that they don’t require the same amount of work as being in a science field does. Not only are these kinds of comments inaccurate, but they’re rude.
Yes, I do know that a lot of the science classes are hard, and I have never implied otherwise.
The point of this is not to say that I think any major is harder than another. The point is to say that if you don’t know absolutely everything that people in a certain major are involved with, please keep your comments to yourself.
