Undergraduate Program

Imagine you’re the spokesperson for a major U.S. city. What would you do if the mayor’s house was raided by the FBI? Or if your city was hit by a tornado? Or if a white police officer shot an unarmed black man?

The undergraduate students in COMM 209: Urban Communication have spent this semester studying exactly those kinds of communication challenges. For Lecturer Desiree Peterkin Bell, who is President and CEO of her own boutique public affairs firm, teaching her students to be able to address real world problems is what it’s all about.

On April 12 and 19, 11 Penn seniors presented the culmination of their year of work on their Communication theses to a panel of professors, guests, and fellow students. The students wrote an honors thesis and/or a Communication and Public Service Capstone Thesis as a required part of their ComPS concentration. All will graduate with honors at Annenberg’s ceremony on May 14.

By one estimate, nearly 50 million people in the U.S. have tried online dating. It’s no surprise, then, that most of us know someone who found their partner online.

It’s less common these days that singles seek love via a matchmaker. While still a thriving business in specific countries and communities, matchmakers almost seem like a quaint throwback to an earlier time. 

It’s that cultural shift that interested Tyler Burke C’17.

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the undergraduate Communication major at Penn, we featured five of our current Communication majors in a series on social media. Below is a compilation of that series, in which we captured the students in their own words. 

Yesterday evening, Penn’s Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CURF) hosted its 2017 Spring Research Symposium and Poster Session. Four Annenberg Communication Majors, all of whom received CURF research grants, were among those to present posters.

Seth Grossman didn’t come to Penn to major in Communication. In fact, Annenberg was largely off his radar when he first arrived on campus as a freshman in the fall of 1997.

But Grossman soon discovered a political communication niche for himself within the Annenberg community, and his Communication major set the stage for an impressive career: a Yale Law degree followed by a Supreme Court clerkship, the role of Deputy General Counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, and now Chief of Staff to Janet Napolitano, President of the University of California.

As a complement to its expert faculty members, the Annenberg School invites notable practitioners of Communication to offer undergraduate courses in their areas of expertise. This Spring, Annenberg is welcoming two new lecturers to its roster: Howard Fineman, The Huffington Post’s Global Editorial Director and a longtime news analyst for NBC and MSNBC, and Desiree Peterkin Bell, an accomplished communication strategist who served in the administrations of Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. 

Penn Media Scholars in China is a new summer institute that will bring eight Penn undergraduates to the Chinese cities of Beijing and Hangzhou from June 5-30, 2017. There they will study China’s media industries, institutions, and citizens’ everyday media practices.

The program is also expected to run in the summer of 2018.

The program is being directed and led by Professor Guobin Yang, Associate Professor of the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Sociology.

A national political convention in America is quite a thing to behold. For four nights, nearly every major politician in a given party is in one arena, along with every news outlet and its top journalists, thousands of delegates, a smattering of celebrities, and countless volunteers and political professionals making the whole thing run smoothly.  The speeches, the signs, the balloons, the video, the lights — it is political pageantry at the highest level.

What better classroom could there possibly be to study political communication?

Michael Kleiman (C’06), documentary filmmaker and Penn alumnus, returned to campus on Nov. 30 to speak to Amy Jordan’s COMM 125 class about the intersection of communication and policy issues.