Q: Why do Strategic and Corporate Communication Majors Need to Take Principles of Microeconomics?

A: To thrive in the workplace and everyday life.

Strategic and Corporate Communication is a major that enables students to acquire the necessary skills to be a professional communicator. We are trained to advance an organization’s agenda (vision, mission, services) utilizing persuasive messaging. These techniques can be applied to many industries and settings including for profit and non-profit work.

Because this major emphasizes both business and communication, it is important for students who major in SCC to take a certain number of business classes. Among these classes is Principles of Microeconomics. This is a very crucial class for SCC majors as it can be applied to everyday life and help students excel in their future careers. Microeconomics can be applied to a vast array of career choices other than finance, including entertainment, advertising, food service, sales, and much more. This can be especially helpful because majoring in SCC opens up a wide variety of career opportunities for students beyond strictly business and communication.

Microeconomics is the study of how individuals and businesses make decisions based on their limited resources. Thus, it affects most people in their daily lives as many people have limited time and resources either personally or in their business. Learning the basics of microeconomics involves learning how to maximize personal satisfaction for yourself or your company. Microeconomics also does not have to just involve complicated numbers and equations. Because microeconomics involves evaluating resources and using them appropriately, a career in the entertainment industry might rely on microecon to allocate various responsibilities such as staff management, set management, and salary management for workers behind the stage or screen. For food service, a manager or boss must be able to calculate how much food to buy from the distributor so as not to waste food and to gain more money than spent. For a sales person who sells their own product, they must be able to figure out the optimal combination of how many products they can make in a day versus the amount of hours it takes to make sure they utilize their time well and meet the demands of their customers. This is better known as supply and demand. If an SCC student is studying for microeconomics, they must make sure that the potential benefit of studying for that test in order to receive an A is greater than the potential of not studying (or studying very little) for another subject’s test and failing. This is known as opportunity cost.

Economics affects everyday life. People make big and small decisions every day to maximize satisfaction as students, sellers, and consumers. Thus, the ability to understand the market and make well informed decision is very important to excel in school and in the workforce no matter what career field a School of Communication major chooses to enter.