Welcome to our web site.

The Department of Communication is one of the largest departments at NC State, with nearly 1,000 undergraduate majors and about 18 full- or part-time graduate students. The undergraduate curriculum offers three programs toward a degree: Public and Interpersonal Communication, Communication Media, and Public Relations and Organizational Communication. Each concentration places communication theory at its core. Faculty members collaborate on research and teaching, often across the program areas. Our professional interdependence reflects our departmental culture, which is characterized by mutual respect, friendliness and dedication to advancing the teaching, research and service missions of the university.

We inaugurated our M.S. in applied communication program with the 2001-02 academic year. (Click here to see our graduate program page.) On the undergraduate side, we recently implemented a core curriculum that gives our majors an integrated, innovative and rigorous understanding of the rapidly changing field of communication, a field now at the intellectual and economic forefront of the global information society. Our hiring of some 10 new tenure-track faculty members over the past few years has added significantly to who we are and what we can accomplish. Members of our faculty teach well and develop state-of-the-art courses, publish books with the best presses and articles in the top journals, and serve on editorial boards for various high-quality scholarly journals. (Click here to see brief biographies of all faculty members.) They also participate in our community, state and nation through various outreach and educational programs, and receive prestigious appointments and research grants. In the past few years, for instance, one member of our faculty served as Lombard Visiting Professor at Harvard, another won a Kaiser Foundation grant to study the depiction of Hispanics in media, a third obtained a grant from the Engineering Information Foundation to research gender and communication in engineering workgroups, and two faculty members have been co-principal investigators on two different large grants from the National Science Foundation. Working with this outstanding faculty, our students frequently participate in academic research conferences, publish articles in academic journals, and win national awards for video and radio productions, among other impressive achievements.

The Department's highly successful internship program places dozens of students each year in positions of responsibility and challenge, helping prepare them for jobs around the nation. Our alumni serve in a variety of important positions. They include a member of the U.S. Congress, producers of national television programs, heads of major university programs, executives with some of the nation's largest corporations, highly successful entrepreneurs, and managers of the Internet presence for some of the country's leading newspapers.

Thank you for visiting us. If you have questions or need more information, please contact us at (919) 515-9736 or 515-9737.

Kenneth S. Zagacki
Professor and Head
Department of Communication