Have you ever wondered how a degree in communication might amplify your career prospects across professional sectors like business, government and beyond? In this episode, Brent Yergensen, Ph.D., chair of the UT Tyler Communication Department and associate professor, examines the historical significance of communication in academia, coupled with his thoughts on the challenges of teaching effective communication skills to the digital native generation.
Yergensen explores the myriad applications of a communication degree, focusing not only on the wealth of job prospects awaiting graduates but also on the inherent real-world value of effective human interaction. In an era marked by rapid technological evolution, he discusses the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the field and the future career prospects for students.
LANDESS: For UT Tyler Radio, I’m Mike Landess. The tenth most popular major on college and university campuses across the country is communication and media studies. Nearly 67,000 degrees were handed out last year, down slightly from the year before. Here to talk about communications programs and their value in the real world is UT Tyler’s Dr. Brent Yergensen, the department chair and associate professor of communication at UT Tyler. Welcome.
YERGENSEN: Hello, glad to be here. Thank you, Mike.
LANDESS: Having spent my entire career on the broadcast side of communication, radio and television, I see a lot of young graduates who want to be on the air. They want to be a reporter or maybe an anchor. But there are a lot more applications for such a degree than broadcast.
YERGENSEN: Yes, largely branching into and influencing any professional sector: business, government, these types of things. So, there’s the media side, and then there’s the kind of the communication studies of the interaction side, and it’s a fantastic program to develop your career, to put together ideas for corporations you want to run. Whatever it may be, there’s a lot there.
LANDESS: In looking over this, I hadn’t really looked at it from this particular perspective before. But in doing some research, the top eight in this list of things that you could be doing with this degree: public relations specialist, brand strategist, journalist and news anchor in there. Business reporter, marketing coordinator, copywriter, managing editor. I mean there are so many aspects to this that it seems like, I wonder if most people are aware that it’s that broad.
YERGENSEN: Yeah, it’s hard to see how broad it is because communication people typically think of communication as a process rather than kind of an object or a noun. It’s a major that’s very much a verb kind of a thing, but it goes into so many things. And if we look at the history of academia, as one of the original three disciplines that Plato put together was the study of communication, your capacity to interact has everything to do with your professional, with your personal success. It’s connected to ethics and, as you mentioned, we live in this digital mediated world. We have for a long, long time, and we’re the field that’s studying focused on, fixated on succeeding in that, and so it’s a fantastic degree. It’s a fantastic element to study, and it goes into so many things.
LANDESS: Earlier I mentioned the real-world value of a communication degree. How hard is it for students who get their degree on Saturday to go out and land a job on Monday? And are learning institutions putting more of an emphasis on doing rather than theory?
YERGENSEN: I think so. Because one thing we can trace and we can look at is there’s a little bit of a differentiation between, kind of the ivory tower of academia, versus the professional sector of the bottom line type of a thing. And I think communication is one of the leading fields, along with business, that kind of bridges that, in and of itself. Within academia, as much as you should learn theory, as much as you should focus on studying, I guess, the topics of the day, there has to be a practical element, there has to be a skill set, there has to be something that you can trust your clients, something that you can trust your friends with that I trust that this person can sit down with my clients and make a difference and build a relationship they’re going to want to come back. And that’s a craft, that’s a skill, and it’s something that we judge immediately when we have interactions with someone. We know how we feel about someone within the first few seconds within a conversation or an interview. We know within the first couple of minutes we’re going to hire someone. The way they carry themselves is communicative act, and so it’s broad, it’s media, it’s production. It’s also small, it’s minor, it’s interpersonal; it’s in groups, it’s in organizations, it’s prudence, it’s wisdom. And so those are the things and the principles we draw upon, that we work to transfer to students, to give them skills, to make them think about the nature of what human beings are experiencing, and I could call it variables — studying the many variables that the people around you they’re going through.
LANDESS: How difficult is it to convey all of that that you just talked about to the TikTok age?
YERGENSEN: Very, very good. And so you have to talk about kids, you have to talk about technology, because kids are married and glued to technology versus conversations. And so my wife and I, we’ve had this conversation with and about our teenagers that the idea of having a phone conversation is this difficult or borderline, traumatizing sometimes. And so, as wonderful and as beautiful as media is, and we’re ever plugged in, the face-to-face element becomes difficult to to manage. But the more you unravel the sense of understanding the human experience and understanding human beings and what they’re going through and the many variables, what they’re going through-maybe they’re dealing with the illness of a loved one, maybe they’re simply hungry, maybe…
LANDESS: Hangry…
YERGENSEN: Hangry, yes. All of these things, whatever they’re going through, principles and elements of a communication program, allow us to tap into that. And when you realize that when we have that understanding of other human beings, there’s this beautiful observation and capacity to understand and work with people. And we can not only gauge and understand other people around us, we can walk away from the experiences we have with other people, and we can watch their nonverbal and their verbal feedback that they’re giving us, and we realize I’ve made their life, their day, their minute a little bit better. And so, there’s this hope that we can improve the human experience, and that goes into so many settings that communication degree is meant to do. But you asked how hard is that? It’s becoming increasingly difficult. That’s why we sell one, public speaking and two, our interpersonal communication classes, and we try to get those as broadly distributed as possible. People walk out of those classes with a different perspective of understanding human beings, and I think fear is set aside largely.
LANDESS: You talked about the human experience. Do you worry about the effect of AI, artificial intelligence, and what that’ll have on graduating students and their career prospects? Or even through the process of getting their degree?
YERGENSEN: Yeah, I think so. I think we have to measure that and weigh that, because we’ve now entered a setting where are we kind of entering this fuzz area where we are part of technology and technology is part of us, and what do we need to make sure we produce and what do we need to be aware of what’s happening with technology? But there’s a lot of ethical concerns. There’s a lot of, I guess we could say, I want to call it a moral conversation, but kind of an ethical conversation that happens there as well. But this is what I always tell people: we’re seeing an evolution of technology, and mass media is embedded in that as well, in a way that we can’t necessarily keep up with. We can’t keep up with what’s happening technologically, and so you can probably see I’m struggling to answer your question is because it’s coming at us so quickly. Technological advances and opportunities are coming with us, and there’s so much opportunity that’s embedded in there, but at the same time we’re always trying to hit the brakes of where are we going? What’s happening here? How do we make sense of this? And largely, I think the ultimate answer is, are we losing ourselves? And it goes back to your previous question as well. I think to a degree we are losing ourselves, but we can pull that back. We can strip ourselves away from technology a little bit as well and get back to the, as I mentioned, the many variables of the human experience that is difficult and challenging, and I guess that basis of relationships.
LANDESS: Our guest has been UT Tyler’s Dr. Brent Yergensen, department chair and associate professor of communication. To hear this conversation again or to share it, go to KVUT.org. I’m Mike Landess for UT Tyler Radio.
(Transcripts are automatically generated and may contain phonetic spellings and other spelling and punctuation errors. Grammar errors contained in the original recording are not typically corrected.)