Info for Students
GRADUATE Focus Areas

Cornell's graduate program in Communication has three focus areas: science, media, and technology.

Science

How do people with considerably different levels of expertise communicate with each other? This question is a central concern of this concentration, which investigates communication among scientists, politicians, and citizens. Scientists, for example, accept a degree of uncertainty or risk in almost everything they encounter; meanwhile, the public often demands complete assurance that a given project will not harm them or the environment. The clash between these cultures is one aspect of a multifaceted concentration that also studies science journalism, public understanding of science, and informal science and health education.

Courses in science and technology studies, education, policy analysis and management, and natural resources often dovetail with communication courses to round out curricula of students specializing in this area.

Media

This concentration seeks to understand how communication affects people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. This includes macroscopic and microscopic perspectives. For example, how do our personal experiences shape our interpretation of television? And how do social contexts, such as discussion networks or groups, influence how informed we are or how we think about political issues?

Outside the communication field, students in this concentration find complementary courses in psychology, government, development sociology, and policy analysis and management.

Technology

Research in this area focuses on the interaction between people and new means of communication. New media present an array of communication issues such as user interfaces, collaborative work and learning, knowledge management, and other effects on communication processes and social interactions.

The Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Group, a laboratory within the concentration, studies a variety of topics, including communication in the online environment, educational learning systems, the future of digital libraries, and information visualization.

Courses in computer science, information sciences, science and technology studies, psychology, and policy analysis and management are also relevant to this area.