Communication Faculty Majors/Minors Intern/Outcomes Senior Seminars Study Abroad Interact Honorary TV/Radio Alumni Hiram College

Communication majors at Hiram look with pride to the academic rigor of their communication courses. Their crowning accomplishment is the completion of each student's SENIOR SEMINAR PROJECT, a substantial piece of original research on a topic of the student's choosing. Friends, family members, and faculty gather to attend the weeks-in-preparation oral presentation which represents a reporting back of the student's senior seminar paper. Each year the students vote on what they consider to be the two best Senior Seminar papers of that academic year. This year one traditional student, Emily Mastin, and one weekend college student, Monica Ciszczon, received best paper honors. Monica gave a presentation on her research at this year's baccalaureate ceremony. Read what Emily and Monica have to say about their senior seminar projects. EMILY MASTIN DOING MY RESEARCH I have always been fascinated by the dynamics of human relationships. I began to formulate a tentative outline of what my Senior Seminar research would look like in my Communication Theory class when I designed a study testing some elements of relationship messages. As we were not required to run this study, I needed to refine and refocus for my research project which would require me to run the study and report my results. After a period of additional research, and much thinking about it, I settled on a study that would explore how women avoid confrontation especially in matters of intimacy between heterosexual couples. I learned through looking at other research that there are two distinctly different views of how "traditional" women should behave. I was interested in isolating and describing these behaviors by constructing a survey that would tap into the different messages woman chose to handle requests for physical intimacy. After running my survey, I compared survey responses to the behaviors of women depicted on the MTV television channel. I found that views of how woman should communicate intimacy messages is changing in our society today. WHAT I LEARNED I felt a wonderful sense of accomplishment and pride when I completed my original research. I learned one can start with a small idea that over time and a lot of work will turn into something significant that one can be proud of one day. My Senior Seminar was definitely the highlight and culmination of my four years at Hiram College.