Introductory Blog Post

Hi! My name is Susan Nielsen, and this is my first blog post, not only for this ALES 204 class, but my first blog post ever! Therefore, I am slowly trying to navigate my way around blogger.com in order to make it through this class successfully!

This is a photo of me standing in an old graveyard in Edinburgh, Scotland
(This is my own photo; January 18, 2012)

I am currently in my second year of university at the U of A. I am in the Human Ecology program: majoring in Family Studies and minoring in Child and Youth Studies. Honestly, this is my first year of actually being in the Human Ecology program, but my second year of university overall. I started out in the faculty of arts, transferred to Nutrition and Food Science (which is also in the faculty of ALES), and finally, transferred to the Human Ecology program for this semester. I am currently taking courses such as: psychology, sociology, and human ecology. In the future, I plan on going into the masters' program for human ecology or possibly sociology and, in the end, I hope to become a professor so that I am able to teach, as well as work on research within my field. Here is a link to the U of A human ecology webpage (this is the school that I hope to attend for the rest of my undergraduate degree, my masters' program, and hopefully the PhD program): http://www.hecol.ualberta.ca/

Currently, communication has, what I consider to be, a big role in my life. I use facebook on a daily basis, I have facebook on my phone and I am constantly in contact with people through the use of facebook because it is free to use globally, rather than calling. I am also attached (figuratively) to my cell phone, which I use for constant communication with the most important people in my life via texting and phone calls. I have just started using Twitter for this class but it has become a form of social media that I now use every day and use to communicate with my classmates. This blog is now a new form of social media that I will be able to use to communicate with others across the globe, and I am looking forward to learning more about my classmates through the use of these blogs!

I believe that the role of communication is very important in the field of Human Ecology because it is a very interpersonal field that involves working with people of all backgrounds, cultures, and ages. Communication will be essential to our everyday work as human ecological professionals; and good communication will be key to facilitating even the most simple events. Communication will be most important when dealing with clients - understanding their thoughts and ideas regarding your services is the most important thing in human ecology because the most important member of the team is always the client! Another time that communication will be very important is when a team of professionals are trying to work together to attain a common goal for the common good of everyone involved. As we have learned in our human ecology 100 course this may involve many different types of communication, such as: body language, verbal, written, physical appearance (smell, look, setting), etc. All of these types of communication are very important and can give you a lot of different information as to what is happening in any situation - this is very important for human ecology professionals, especially when dealing with families who need our assitance. Loana Valdez makes a very good point in her blog about the idea of communication noise, which is also something that we learnt about in our human ecology 100 course last term, check it out here: http://valdezl.blogspot.com/  Overall, communication is very important in all aspects of human ecology and we would not survive as a profession without it.