Graduate Studies-Prospective Students

Graduate study in the College of Communications is based in the research and teaching expertise of the College’s distinguished graduate faculty.  We believe that graduate communications scholarship is most effective and rewarding when graduate students are given the opportunity to work with a cadre of prominent scholars whom students have identified as having the particular expertise that best suits their scholarly objectives.

Our experience confirms the proposition that graduate students thrive in a program that facilitates their active and ongoing collaboration with leading scholars.  Therefore, rather than offering graduate programs based on the expected, generic list of graduate communication courses, our focus is centered on seminars and track configurations that reflect our faculty’s expertise.

The mass communications graduate faculty at Penn State is among the very best in the country.  Faculty members have a diversity of specializations uncommon elsewhere, and their individual and collective national reputations and research productivity have been widely recognized.  The following are just some of the many accolades that they -- in partnership with their graduate students – have recently received:

• In a reputational survey conducted by the National Communication Association, the College ranked eighth among mass communication doctoral programs nationally in quality of faculty and effectiveness of educating researchers and, significantly, second in positive change in the past five years.
• The College also was ranked first among doctoral programs in the mass communications and media studies based on scholarly productivity of the program faculty (The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 12, 2007).
• Penn State ranked fifth in the number of graduate students in journalism and mass communications who authored referred articles in major academic journals in the field over the past decade (AEJMC conference paper, 2008).
• The College was ranked as a “Top 10 department” in 22 categories of research in the field of communications and eight of its faculty were designated “Leading Scholars” for their research productivity in one or more of those research categories, according to a study by the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship.
• Penn State ranked second among U.S. institutions in the number of papers published over the past five years in communications journals indexed by Thomson Reuters (ScienceWatch 2008).
  

Other positive indicators are the large increases in research productivity (measured in terms of scholarly presentations to national conferences) among mass communications doctoral students and placements of graduates at more prestigious institutions (e.g. Penn, Illinois, North Carolina, Florida).

Further, the College’s graduate programs maintain a highly diverse student population with a healthy balance of women, minorities, and internationals progressing toward advanced degrees. The 2004 internal program review by the Penn State Graduate School noted that "the College again deserves to be commended for its outstanding efforts to successfully attract an increasingly diverse student body."

For more detailed information about our individually-tailored, research-oriented graduate programs, please follow the links below, and if you have questions, please contact us at brh3@psu.edu or call (814) 865-3070

Ph.D. in Mass Communications
M.A. in Media Studies
M.A. in Telecommunications