Today marked the last day of a class I took this quarter titled, Intro to Communication II. And wow, what a course.

Coming into it, I definitely had some assumptions. This was an introductory class after all, so as a senior in the journalism department, how much did I really have to learn? Well, a whole lot, and every piece of information my brain absorbed this quarter during this class impacted me significantly.

I’ll start by saying that communication is relevant in literally every aspect of life. Humans do it on many, many levels, but animals do it too, so understanding the differences between us and them, and even one another is vital.

But because of the vitality of communications in our every day life, sometimes it’s easy to take it for granted or ignore the deeper, hidden messages that we might not ever consider.

It’s more than just what we communicate too, it’s all about how. And man, now that this class is over, I sincerely feel like it should be a graduation requirement for high schoolers. Learning these basic communication ideas wasn’t only about advancing me professionally, though as a UW course it might fall under the guise of professional development.

I’m mad not everyone gets to take classes like this.

I’m disappointed that people underestimate or devalue important things like the way humans communicate with one another, while simultaneously promoting and funding everything else.

We value professional sports, celebrities, religion, and science. But what about each other?

It seems to me that in our “All-American” (what even is that anyway?) culture, we focus on the accomplishments and special qualities of the unique few – which generally makes sense because if everyone is special, nobody is – but the gross amount of time and worship and money we put into those things does humanity a great disservice. 

I think the key takeaway in my communication course was that the more we study how communication works, the more prone we might be in ensuring our own messages are decoded the way we intend them to be, and we might even start caring for other people holistically (shocking I know), instead of our immediate and intimate social circles.

Just some food for thought.