I’m thrilled for the opportunity to try to fill the BIG shoes of Dr. Richardson in the role as Director of Graduate Studies. It’s an especially exciting time for graduate education here at UNT due to our new capacity to compensate our TAs with partial tuition reimbursements (and hopefully by next year, tuition costs will be fully covered for our TAs). This University-wide commitment to better funding is long overdue and will make our master’s program in Communication Studies even more competitive as we continue to recruit the very best cohorts of graduate students each year.

Beyond this fortuitous shift in funding opportunities, I plan to use my role as DGS to help strengthen the supportive bonds of our current cohorts of grad students; to work toward making the process of attaining a master’s degree in Communication Studies as transparent as possible; and to help build relationships between our program and outside partners to bolster both the pipelines from our master’s program to the country’s best PhD programs for students who are doctoral-program bound and to support students seeking the master’s degree as a terminal degree in their quests to secure meaningful, engaged, and challenging work outside the academy.

Our current cohort is strong and smart and committed to their best education. I am so looking forward to continuing to build upon our strong history of successes to ensure that the future of our master’s program continues to flourish.

We’d love to hear from our past graduates – How has your master’s degree in Communication Studies from UNT helped YOU succeed in life? What are some of the most important lessons you learned in this program? What advice can you give to our current cohorts? Feel free to e-mail me with any feedback for me to pass along: suzanne.enck@unt.edu.

Go Mean Green – CAW!

-Suzanne Enck