Well, I accidentally signed up for a communication major.
Growing up I did not have an imaginary friend like most people have imaginary friends.
I had an imaginary television station, John TV-I was very original-
so I had always had this sort of fascination with television and television production.
Then, you can tell I was a very discerning high school student, I looked at the list of majors in the application
and I thought it was: Check something you're interested in.
So I saw "Communication Media: Film and TV Production" and thought, cool! You can major in television?
So I checked that box thinking, okay, I want to learn more about this.
Well I get my acceptance letter in the mail saying, "Congratulations, John, you've been accepted into the College of Humanities and Social Sciences as a communication major."
I thought: What? I didn't mean to do this.
But I sort of stuck with it. The freshman semester they put you into the introductory communication class.
I had Ed Funkhouser as my professor for that, who is the voice of the Wolfpack at the NC State football games
and who has been my mentor ever since,
and I fell in love with it and I knew that's what I wanted to do for my major,
because if I had gone into something like the First Year College
I never would have been able to settle on my major because I'm interested in so many things,
but with communication the way we communicate has an impact on so many different disciplines and areas of life.
Whether it's in science or whether it's in politics or whether it's in art,
being able to communicate with each other has a great impact on how successful we are in our endeavors,
and having such a broad focus, but also such an important one, was just wonderful for me in my college education and future career.
So I chose my communication major with a media concentration and I stuck with that,
and then I had all this extra time. I entered as a sophomore
so I could take some classes on the side and I was trying to decide what to do with that time
to coalesce it into some sort of program.
I went into my advisor one day
and said I want to do three minors. I want to do biology, history, and religious studies.
Her name's Sandy Stallings and she's one of the heads of the interdisciplinary studies program
as well as a communication advisor,
so she said, "Have you ever thought about putting those together into your own major?"
So I said, "No, but I'll think about it."
So I designed a major studying science and religion in American society,
how they interact, how they clash,
and the sort of sociological implications of that.
That was an incredible experience because I got to design my major.
I got to take courses-. The whole point is to build bridges between colleges at NC State.
So often we create these silos of academia where science has to talk with science
and CALS has to talk with CALS and CHASS has to talk with CHASS,
but to create a program that's explicitly designed to cross those silos
and break them down, so to speak, was a really great experience at State
because I was able to take biology and anthropology and genetics courses
and pair them with history and sociology
and think about how they interacted and how they interplayed, so I thought that ended up being a very good choice for my major.