COMM107: The Trials and Tribulations of Tom Sless

COMM107. What a class. There are so many different things I could say about the experience. But I don't want to get ahead of myself, so I'm just going to talk about the class from start to finish.

I want to go back to mid-summer, when I was registering for my Fall classes at orientation. I was shown the requirements that I had already met for both the University Core, as well as the Business school core. I was told that I should enroll in a statistics class, an intro to business class and a math class. However, one of the classes that I noticed was required was this class, COMM107, or Oral Communication: Principles and Practices according to Testudo. At the time, I had no idea why I would need to take this class. To think that, in order to major in business, we needed to take a course in communications! I was hoping that I could jump right in to finance, marketing and operations courses once I got to UMD, but apparently those subject areas had to wait until I learned how to speak publicly.

So I registered for COMM107 at that time, selecting the 8 AM class. Of course, my faulty reasoning is to blame here, as I thought waking up at 8 would mean that I would be more focused and treat the semester more like a school year than a vacation from home. I soon learned that my sleep was much more valuable than my grades. However, I didn’t want to coward out of my commitment, so I tried to attend as many classes as I could. I certainly was one of the people affected by the few, but too plentiful, instances where class was cancelled around fifteen minutes before class. I realize that there was nothing that Andi could do about these, as most times it was due to some unfortunate accident, but it still didn’t help my opinion of the class.

However, when I was in class, I found that it was much more enjoyable as a whole than I had assumed. The guest speakers that came in brought with them high levels of expertise and experience, and presented information that was both valuable and applicable to my career goals, as well as I’m sure many of the other students in the class. I also liked the consistent use of videos in class, and the concept of the impromptu speech. I wish we could have done more with the impromptu speech aspect, but it was tough to forecast for some of the classes we missed. I also didn’t mind the blog. I got into a habit of just checking it every time I got on the computer, and many times after that, as if it was Facebook, just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I liked being able to read about everyone else’s speech topics as well, as it helped give some context to their eventual speeches. However, I would adamantly suggest that the Facebook group be initiated at the start of classes, since people (including myself) constantly had questions that could not be necessarily answered in a timely fashion on the blog. In other words, I would use the blog as an ELMS replacement, and the Facebook group as basically a discussion section.

In the end though, I’d say I’m better off from taking this class. While it was tough to meet people at first, eventually we became more acclimated and I met a lot of nice and interesting people in this class. Would I take the class again? Probably not. But was it worth it? Absolutely.

Photo Cred: Public Speaking