Epilogue
Oh hi there! You’re still here? Well, let use take a moment to thank you for your attention and engagement. As noted in the prologue of this text, it was our goal to provide you with both useful information and practical examples that make you want to read this book. I’m sure at times there were moments where you rolled your eyes and said “will duh, everyone knows that.” From those moments you can glean two things. First, know that there is evidence, scientific evidence, to back up what you already knew colloquially. Second, in many cases you can now know that there is a word, term, of phrase associated with that “no duh” moment. At the very least you can speak on those issues with academic confidence!
Alternatively, it is our hope that you encountered useful new information that you can carry without both into additional communication classes and also out into the world! Knowledge about the self, gender, culture, technology, and even the most fundamental mechanisms of communication are not just scholastically stimulating, it’s also really cool information that people enjoy hearing about. Spread the world! Tell people what you know. Not everyone is fortunate enough to attend college, and you may be the harborer of information to those in your life. Take that responsibility seriously and make use of what you know.
At the more immediate level, we think it’s important for you to take a moment of reflection. Consider where your college career is currently at versus where you’d like it to be upon graduation. Now, in some rare cases, you may be reading this as you anticipate graduation. In that case, congratulations! Onward you go. To those still taking classes, we would encourage you to flip through the chapters of this book and consider the thing that you found most interesting – the topics you’d want to learn more about. As you do that, consider the following classes that we offer here at UT:
-COMM 3010: Nonverbal Communication
-COMM 3120: Family Communication
-COMM 3150: The Dark Side of Interpersonal Relationships
-COMM 3190: Intercultural Communication
-COMM 3400: Gender Communication
-COMM 4115: Communicating in Close Relationships
-COMM 4500: Communication and Conflict
That’s right, seven of the 12 chapters we covered in this text have entire classes dedicated to that very topic! Secondary classes, those which are interpersonal adjacent, but not focuses, include:
-COMM 3180 – Patient & Provider Relationships
-COMM 3290 – Globalization, Culture, and Identity
-COMM 3330 – Negotiations and Bargaining
-COMM 4010 – Persuasion
Welp, quite frankly, that’s it! That’s all we’ve got for you. Again, we hope you both learned from and enjoyed the content. The science of communication is, in our opinion, as riveting of a topic as one can encounter in higher education. With that said, go off into the world. Be active in your communication and apply it to your lived experience as well as your academic journey. In other words, keep that active learning and active life. burning strong!