Doctoral students are required to take a set of core, concentration, and cognate courses to complete CCI’s interdisciplinary doctoral degree. Core courses are taught by faculty from across the college. These courses are designed to help doctoral students understand the common threads across disciplinary areas in communication and information that are found in literature, theories, and methods to integrate knowledge and skill set. 

Concentration courses are taught by faculty in each of the 4 schools. Most students define their concentration in terms of one of the disciplinary areas within the college based upon their research focus in advertising, communication studies, information sciences, journalism and media, or public relations. 

Cognate courses are most often a set of courses from a discipline outside the college. Frequent cognate areas include marketing, sociology, political science, psychology, education, etc., and some students define their cognates in a more interdisciplinary way, taking courses from across the university in broad areas. 

Doctoral students focus on a disciplinary area of study, meaning that the concentration and cognate courses vary for each student, depending upon the doctoral student’s research focus. Below is an example of courses a doctoral student would typically take in their first year.