Why I'm a Communication Major

Woman are much more talkative than men.

This is the assumption we as a culture hold, and by observation, my conclusion is that cultural assumptions have some relative truth. My observation comes from growing up with a lot of women. My father left when I was three, and so I was raised by a mother, a grandmother, two aunts, and five stay-at-home moms in my neighborhood. Interestingly, this elder-female influence was balanced with a slew of male friends my age.

So why does this all matter? It matters because I was forced to learn to communicate with so many different women, and some men, at such a young age. There were no assumptions, as can often be found in a single stable family, so everything about my life was communication. Interestingly one of my expertise is family communication, despite reading almost nothing about it.

The other important part of my childhood was video games, which was my social catalyst with male friends. Unlike most kids at the time, I played games on the computer - my only consistent "parent." I say parent because I learned a lot of what to do and how to do it from the internet. I was probably one of the first "internet kids." I communicated with strangers on the internet starting at about 8 years-old (but never found myself in any danger), had fun forays into the anonymity of the environment by sometimes pretending to be a girl or much older than I was, and found myself easily using it as a tool for communication.

Moving forward a decade or two, I find myself studying communication because it's what I know and love. It's one of my biggest passions, and I truly believe it to be the most important part of the human experience. Sometimes I get discouraged by the irony of my classmates rarely communicating in class, and not being able to express ideas, but all-in-all I persevere knowing I can do something to help the world by improving its communication.

So what is communication? Communication is the process by which one lifeform sends a message to another lifeform, who receives it. This message need not be intended or superliminal, nor does it need to be verbal.