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Dean David Perlmutter Circle

E IS FOR ENGAGEMENT

When I first became dean of the College of Media & Communication almost two years ago, I heard a loud, clear and immediate message from our alumni: We want to engage and help students directly.

In context, one of the reasons I was eager to join Texas Tech was the impressive amount and variety of professional engagement within the college and externally. Historically, many programs in our field have been driven by rivalries and fissures: the quantitative scholars vs. the qualitative; the professionals vs. the researchers; teachers embracing new modalities and technologies (the latest and greatest) vs. those insisting on the eternal value of fundamentals (the tried and true). I have seen too many communication programs in gridlock or, worse, in civil war because of these paradigm divides.

I had heard that CoMC had an almost unique culture of collaboration and cooperation that was built over decades by Billy I. Ross, Jerry Hudson, and the faculty, staff, students, and alumni. In the classroom you see a deep respect for the fundamentals, like teaching good, clear, effective writing, as well as continual experimentation and innovation in new technologies and techniques. We consider such balance when we plan for the future and hire educators to join us. In the last two years, we will have almost doubled the size of our faculty, adding both very experienced professionals and pioneering scholars. You will find them working together on projects for the community, for discovering new knowledge, and for improving teaching.

External industry engagement is also a priority. CoMC has a faculty who feel professional practice is vital to integrate into a classroom outcome. Each semester you will find a large number of our classes across all the departments taking on a non-profit, government or private-sector client. We know that, toward our goal of producing ethical, thoughtful, critically minded, entrepreneurial “one-woman bands” whose versatility is only matched by their inventiveness, we need to have them both do and think about doing. No employer interviewing them will ask, “What grades did you get?” but rather will say, “Show me what you’ve done and tell me what you think you can do.” Our goal is for all of our students to be able to graduate with a dazzling portfolio as well as the critical thinking skills to be eternal self-starters and dreamers and designers of the “what’s next.”

We have also completely reorganized our undergraduate system. We now have an associate dean for undergraduate affairs and a newly created Center for Student Success, Outeach & Engagement, both of which work with the advising office. We have augmented our recruiting effort to allow us to visit high schools all over Texas and engage teachers and guidance counselors to understand more about what high school students are already learning, seek to learn, and want from a major. Faculty and other staff regularly accompany the recruiters, not only to talk about coming to Texas Tech but also to exchange information about how best to teach the modern student. As one example of how much we have increased our high school outreach, this past January we visited more high schools than we had all last year.

Next, we supplement classroom teaching and client representation with other kinds of venues for professional experiences. As you know, this can be a challenge in Lubbock. We have many close relationships with local employers who take on our students as interns, from TV stations to animal shelters, from museums to auto dealers. But there is simply a limited number of local professional workplaces. So we hold career fairs in Lubbock that draw national employers, as well as a Dallas career fair. We are hoping to regularize the career fair in Houston and start one in alumni-heavy cities like San Antonio, Denver and Albuquerque. We have hired an additional internship and career counselor to seek out opportunities for our students and to work with them toward obtaining an internship or that key first job.

Furthermore, we have expanded the professional outcome-based opportunities within the college. We now have almost a dozen student groups that produce regular content, ranging from our social media monitoring and analytics to our consumer (psycho-physiological) research labs to KTXT (the student radio station) to a fiction filmmaking club to, most prominently, The Hub@TTU (our news and culture group) and the Double T Insider (our sports media club). The Hub has won numerous awards, recognizing its excellent and cutting-edge journalism and entertainment programming. The DTI soared to national prominence when Texas Tech Athletics came to us, so impressed by the professionalism of its reporters, producers and directors, and sought a partnership. Now its weekly broadcast goes directly to the Fox Sports Network, representing Texas Tech Athletics. All such production is extremely expensive and time consuming, but we feel it is worth it to give students as much professional experience as they can acquire.

Finally, we want to maximize the opportunities for interested professionals and alumni to engage our students one-to-one or in groups. We have made student mentoring more of a focus for advisory board meetings and career fairs. We have provided more funds to allow conferences, workshops and one-off visits by alumni and other professionals. I have really been struck by the openness of faculty to give up valuable teaching time for all these visitors, and even more creatively to integrate the constructive insights offered by the professionals into student projects. For their part, our visitors have consistently remarked how much they themselves have learned by close discussion with our consumers and producers of future media. Over this last year, we have calculated, we have had almost a thousand professional and scholarly visitors meet our classes and student groups. In fact, a few months ago, we hired a full-time event and visitor coordinator/planner to help us deal with the volume of visits.

David Perlmutter

In sum, I honestly believe that the College of Media & Communication at Texas Tech University is the most professionally and alumni-engaged and collaborative communications program of which I have ever heard or been a part.



Dean Signature

David D. Perlmutter, Ph.D.