All About the Tracks

Hi, everyone! I just want to make this announcement in my attempt to try and resolve any confusion that you may have over this whole track dilemma. I also hope that you can use this space as your sounding board. Feel free to post questions, comments, dilemmas, problems, etc. Remember: Internet as power, Internet as VOICE! :)

MYTH: Students should stick to one track forever and ever.
TRUTH: You are not getting married. This is an open relationship between you and your track. You are free to have dalliances outside your main declared track.
BOTTOM LINE: The Department *requires* students to declare a track and *encourages* them to take classes from one particular track in order to have a "natural progression" across your four years. For the many students who have approached me fearing that they are unsure about the "commitment" that you are about to make, I want to make it clear that you are NOT required to take ALL classes from one track.

MYTH: All sophomores are restricted to take the basic courses of their tracks for the second semester.
TRUTH: All sophomores are encouraged to take the basic courses of the tracks that they declare. These should provide the foundational knowledge of the chosen discipline after all. But students are not required to take both basic courses. You have to approach one of the faculty advisers to arrange for the courses that you want to take.
BOTTOM LINE: Students are empowered to make choices. Tracks exist to *guide* Comm students and not to restrict them from exploring the diverse, multi-disciplinary, and fundamentally *complementary* courses of our rich and colorful discipline. I truly believe that that the beauty of our discipline is in the diversity of the approaches, orientations, traditions, skills, knowledge sources, and trajectories in it. I personally find that it is through seeing the linkages across tracks and its specific courses can one see the breadth AND depth of what Communication is all about.

MY ADVICE: College life is all about discovering yourself, finding out one's talents and limits, strengths and weaknesses, dreams and fears. In geeky academic terms, it's about identity construction, self-fashioning, the self as a symbolic project. Explore, imagine, make mistakes, learn! Be open to the various ideas to be presented to you and at the same time be critical of them. Treat each reading or text or theorist or teacher not as sacred but as something or someone who opens up a way of seeing, a way of seeing that reveals but at the same time conceals. In deciding your track, you take a brave--and scary--step to knowing YOU even more, as it is a task of self-representation. It is an expression, an imaging, of who you are. But representations, as we have said, are not always complete, and are always changing! Even if you pick a track now, you "own" your college story by the many other course choices that YOU are empowered to pick over the next years. Take responsibility of these choices! And be playful about them as well!

And so, to paraphrase Albus Dumbledore, more than the tracks defining you, it is in our actual and specific actions that you make that determine who you are! And to paraphrase Roger Silverstone, it is the duty of everyone implicated in the media--Media Studies, Journ, Ad and PR, Prod, and any hybrid thereof--to create an ethical space for the Other!