My Thank You Letter to the Department of Communication

I graduated from UC for the first time in 2005 with a BA in Communication. In 2007, I applied to and was accepted into the Master’s Program at the University of Cincinnati Department of Communication. I had the chance to really hone in on a specialized field in this vast art form that was Communication – but what did I want to study?

The beauty of our program is that it gives students visibility in their first year to so many fields – gender studies, religious studies, metrics for research and organizations. The latter was where I felt the most comfortable – learning from and working with Dr. Gail Fairhurst and studying organizational culture, effectively communicating within an organizational setting and learning about training and development.

I graduated with my MA in Organizational Communication in 2009 but still feeling lost as to what I wanted to do with this degree. While figuring this out, I was offered a position to teach Business Communication in the department – something I did while I was in graduate school. This led to an annual adjunct faculty position with an opportunity to be one with the faculty that had such a pivotal role in shaping who I was as a person.

Fast forward 10 years later, I’ve now gone back into the corporate world – getting a job in 2019 at C.H. Robinson, a third-party logistics company with an office here in Cincinnati, headquartered in Minnesota. While my degrees in Communication are certainly helpful working in this industry, they are such a salient part as to how I was able to obtain my next career – recently being promoted to our NA Regional Training & Development Team as a Corporate Trainer. With this new role, I will manage our two-week new hire onboarding program, facilitate our software processing class, manage training tickets, create and maintain our Knowledge Brief library, create user guides & SOPs for the entire NA network and work to provide training opportunities for all NA operations employees across the country.

I remember when I graduated with my masters wondering what could I do now? Now I ask myself “What can’t I do?” It’s because of my background in Organizational Communication focusing on training and development mixed with my ability to teach others how to effectively communicate in this digital world that I have landed the career of my dreams.