Recently Declared Communications Major Doesn’t Know How to Communicate This to Family

By Samhitha Saiba

LOS ANGELES, CA –– USC Sophomore and Olympic bullet-journalist Maya Meeks selected Communications as her field of study last week, but is struggling to communicate this news to her friends and family.

Meeks, 20, spent the last two decades of her life unsure of what higher education could offer her. Her interests were spread thin, like the array of pastel post-it notes with Instagram poems written on them above her desk. So when she took a break one day from searching for purpose in front of Annenberg’s 50-foot-tall glorified iPad and chose to drift into a nearby COMM class instead, she was delighted to have discovered her dream course of study, as well as the bathroom next door.

Meeks soon consulted with absolutely no one before signing up for a full Communications course load and stocking up on the necessary study materials (a singular turquoise gel pen). Her first class this semester was COMM 322, Argumentation and Advocacy; little did she know that these skills would quickly be put to the test, as she now had to explain to her Reagan-Republican mother and financial analyst father why would want to study a subject that its professors can only vaguely articulate and its students are trying to transfer into Marshall from.

“Dad’s big into ‘numbers’ and ‘stats,’” said Meeks, placing air-quotes over the terms she likely thought fuck-all about before choosing her major. “So I spent a long time creating a powerpoint for him explaining my decision. I thought he’d be really impressed by my font choices –– a sophisticated yet gentle Trebuchet MS –– but all he wanted to talk about was the blank bar graphs with multiple question marks on the axes. Like, I was getting there dude.”

Said dude and his wife declined to comment on the unfolding situation out of sheer embarrassment. Yet Meeks remains optimistic that her loved ones will eventually see things her way.

“I really think that if I communicate hard enough and fast enough, they’ll eventually come to it. And if not, I’ll just skip the school part and go straight to answering the emails of someone richer than me, for very little money. I hear Dad is hiring.”