Promoting career awareness and student choice in the introductory course: The Communication Career Awareness Research Project

Helping students make connections between the disciplinary study of communication and the development of student agency in career exploration can be an important part of the mission of the introductory course in communication. This goal can be achieved by implementing a semester-long communication career awareness research project, scaffolded through a series of incremental assignments and designed using best practices for developing student success skills using the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework. Students can exercise independent choice to self-direct their learning not only by exploring a communication-focused career of personal interest, but also by choosing the medium of their final project. Along the way, they engage in intentional goal setting, practice in annotating research sources, and critical self-assessment. Responses from undergraduate students indicate gains in their perceptions of career self-efficacy, especially due to the availability of student choice in the media modality of their project.