Reflection

Although I have not been posting to my blog as much as I should have been, I still feel as if I got a lot from this method of teaching. In my opinion, A blog is a great tool to keep classmates close and to have them all thinking on the same page. Furthermore, it forces a student to keep up to date with class and it keeps their mind on the class.

I feel I could have done better with my blog. I always had the intentions of writing to my blog but I just never seemed to find the time.

As far as continuing my steps as a Communication studies major I am not sure what I will do next semester. I am not sure exactly what classes I want to take but I do believe I want to take classes that also contain some other material such as communications. Possibly marketing of some type of business class would be interesting to me. Since I do not know exactly what I want to be when I am older I want to take the widest variety of classes I can. Hopefully something will click in my head that guides me to what I want to do as a profession when I am older.

Something that I have been considering lately is the possibility of taking some type of debate class next semester. I think that would improve my person to person communication skills and give me the confidence to hold conversations with anybody. 

Verbal Aggression

One meaningful topic that I have covered in class was about verbal aggression within the coach-athlete relationship. It is relevant to me because I deal with this dilemma every day at my baseball practice. My coach is the type of coach to use verbal aggression because he thinks it will get the most out of his players. He believes his job is to make his players reach their highest potential and the only way he knows how to do that is to be hard on us.
Playing for him is both difficult and miserable. My coach takes the fun out of the sport I once loved and had fun playing, which is baseball. Now baseball feels as if it is my JOB and I am forced to go out to the ball park every day. The data that I found in the coach-athlete relationship article is still proving to hold true in the experiences I am going through. I am finding that all of the players on our team despise our coach and passionately disagree on his coaching styles. I find that players become more worked up about how much they hate our coach than actually getting better with baseball and having fun with what they do.
However, if I can pull out anything that may seem positive about this situation, is that if I can play for this coach, I can play for anybody. All I need to do is keep telling myself that this situation is preparing me for the furute and it keeps me going.

Communication in Baseball

What many people do not know about baseball is that there is a lot of communication between the players in the game. Most people assume that baseball is a sport where all you do is hit, field, and pitch a baseball. However, in reality, in order for players to perfom at the highest level they need to communicate. For instance, When a ball is hit between two ball players, they need to communicate with each other so only one of them go for the ball. Imagine if both players went for the ball, then most likely a collision would occur and the ball probably would not get caught.
An instance like this happened a few weeks ago at one of our San Jose State Spartan baseball games. Our second baseman was going out for a fly ball to shallow right field as the right fielder was racing in to catch it as well. With time to spare, our right fielder called off the second Bseman with a loud "Ball! Ball!" call. In this occasion, a collision easily could have occured, and possibly injured one, if not both, of our players.
Another part of baseball that requires communication is before a pitch is even delivered, which is reffered to as pre-pitch communication. This is useful if you know a particluar hitters tendencies. For example, some players always hit balls in the same general direction. So if you know a left handed hitter is primarily a "pull hitter," then you would adjust all of the defensive players toward the right side of the field. So communication plays a large part in getting defensive players where they need to be before the pitch is even delivered.

Communication Struggles in my Life

It is tough to say what exactly is my central communication struggle in my life. The reason for this is that my life is constantly changing. One day I may be stressing about one particular issue and the next day it often changes. So because my thoughts and struggles vary from day to day, I will now talk about a communication struggle that has been lingering in my life as of late, which is speaking with conviction.

The reason speaking with conviction is important is because it is a way of conveying confidence as a speaker. I feel it is important to sound confident in yourself because that will allow other people to listen, or trust what you are saying.

For example, I will give two sentences with the same meaning, and let you decide which has more conviction to it... Jack said, "Hey it is going to rain today so you should bring an umbrella to school with you." While Jill said, "Hey I do not know for sure if it will rain or not, but it might." So as you can see in these two sentences, Jack has more conviction then Jill does. Therefore, it is easier to believe Jack than Jill.

As for applying this subject to class work, I think I can work on speaking with conviction in every one of our assignments. Every assignment I complete from here on out, I will keep "conviction" in the back of my mind. Especially in my future blog posts, I will convey confidence in my own personal self. I hope pursuing coursework in this field will allow me to practice everything that I have already talked about, which is now speaking with conviction.

Intro: Communication Studies

Hello everyone!

My name is Caleb and I am in my 2nd year here at San Jose State. Last semester I finally declared my major, which is Communication Studies. Initially I was confused on which major to choose because I did not know exactly which path in life I wanted to follow. All I knew was that I wanted to keep my options open in regards to finding a job after college; and from what I heard, I can leave those options open with a Communications degree.

Although I still have much to learn about the Communications field, I do already know a few things going in to this class. I know that with a Comm degree, I can pretty much go into any job field that I desire. I feel that Comm can teach a person very crucial "people" skills that will enable to succeed in any situation I am thrown in. What I mean by that is, Communication Studies covers a vast amount of material that can be applied pretty much anywhere in life. For example, in certain Comm classes you can learn anything from 'Business and Professional speaking' to 'marketing' and other public relations..

If I were to describe communication studies as a field, I would call it the field of opportunity. Because with a lot of the other majors offered, you are limited to certain jobs you can get in to. However, I feel with a communication's degree, I can get in to a vast number of jobs and have the opportunity to get almost any job I want.

When thinking about what counts as communication studies and what does not, nothing big rally jumps out in my mind. However, if you want to do something specific such as computer engineering or possibly accounting, then you would have to get that specific degree. But when you consider a more broad range of studying, such as learning about people or even particular facts about the world, then I believe you can consider it to be communication studies.

What I hope to do with my Communications degree is keep my options open in life. Since I do not know exactly what I want to do when I get older, I hope to keep as many options open as I can. Furthermore, I hope with the classes I take I can come to learn, or decide, which job I will pursue after college.