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Well, I accidentally signed up for a communication major.

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Growing up I did not have an imaginary friend like most people have imaginary friends.

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I had an imaginary television station, John TV-I was very original-

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so I had always had this sort of fascination with television and television production.

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Then, you can tell I was a very discerning high school student, I looked at the list of majors in the application

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and I thought it was: Check something you're interested in.

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So I saw "Communication Media: Film and TV Production" and thought, cool! You can major in television?

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So I checked that box thinking, okay, I want to learn more about this.

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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."

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I thought: What? I didn't mean to do this.

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But I sort of stuck with it. The freshman semester they put you into the introductory communication class.

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I had Ed Funkhouser as my professor for that, who is the voice of the Wolfpack at the NC State football games

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and who has been my mentor ever since,

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and I fell in love with it and I knew that's what I wanted to do for my major,

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because if I had gone into something like the First Year College

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I never would have been able to settle on my major because I'm interested in so many things,

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but with communication the way we communicate has an impact on so many different disciplines and areas of life.

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Whether it's in science or whether it's in politics or whether it's in art,

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being able to communicate with each other has a great impact on how successful we are in our endeavors,

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and having such a broad focus, but also such an important one, was just wonderful for me in my college education and future career.

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So I chose my communication major with a media concentration and I stuck with that,

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and then I had all this extra time. I entered as a sophomore

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so I could take some classes on the side and I was trying to decide what to do with that time

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to coalesce it into some sort of program.

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I went into my advisor one day

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and said I want to do three minors. I want to do biology, history, and religious studies.

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Her name's Sandy Stallings and she's one of the heads of the interdisciplinary studies program

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as well as a communication advisor,

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so she said, "Have you ever thought about putting those together into your own major?"

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So I said, "No, but I'll think about it."

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So I designed a major studying science and religion in American society,

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how they interact, how they clash,

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and the sort of sociological implications of that.

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That was an incredible experience because I got to design my major.

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I got to take courses-. The whole point is to build bridges between colleges at NC State.

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So often we create these silos of academia where science has to talk with science

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and CALS has to talk with CALS and CHASS has to talk with CHASS,

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but to create a program that's explicitly designed to cross those silos

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and break them down, so to speak, was a really great experience at State

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because I was able to take biology and anthropology and genetics courses

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and pair them with history and sociology

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and think about how they interacted and how they interplayed, so I thought that ended up being a very good choice for my major.