Concordia / Essays / Prompt 2

Concordia: Application essay (Communication Studies)

Follow the length stated on your program's additional-requirements page; aim for a focused piece of roughly 500 words and do not pad it.

Communication Studies and Communication and Cultural Studies require an application essay. This is where you show you understand communication and media as a field to study, not just as content you enjoy.

What it’s really asking

Faculty want to see how you think about media, culture, and communication as objects of study. They are testing whether you can move from being a consumer of media to analyzing it, and whether you understand what this program actually does.

Why they ask it

Communication Studies is competitive and capped, and many applicants arrive saying only that they 'love social media' or 'want to work in TV.' The essay separates students who can think critically about media from those who simply use it. Showing analytical curiosity is the whole point.

Three ways in

Analyze one piece of media

Take one specific piece of media (a campaign, a platform feature, a news moment) and analyze what it reveals about how communication actually works.

Link experience to a question

Connect a personal experience of media to a larger question you would want to study, not just to a career you want to have.

Show you know the program

Show you know what the program covers (theory, production, culture) and name which part pulls you and why.

✕ Weak opening

“In today's society, social media is everywhere and it affects all of us in many different ways every single day.”

✓ Strong opening

“When a single TikTok sound can reshape how millions of people speak within a week, I want to understand the mechanics underneath that, not just ride the trend.”

✦ Annotated example · Communication Studies application essay. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →

When my town's only newspaper folded, a community Facebook group took its place overnight. I watched a single moderator decide which posts about a proposed highway got pinned and which got buried, and I realized I was looking at editorial power without an editor, a public sphere with no rules anyone had voted on. That spring I started keeping a notebook of how information actually moved through my town, and the notebook is the reason I want to study Communication.¹What I learned is that medium and message are not separable. The highway debate did not just happen to take place on Facebook; the platform's design shaped it. ²An algorithm that rewards anger meant the angriest residents sounded like the majority. Comment threading meant the loudest voice in a reply chain looked like consensus. The absence of a paid editor meant no one was accountable for a correction. I started to see the group not as a place where opinions were expressed but as an infrastructure that produced certain opinions and suppressed others.³I tested this. For a school project I interviewed twelve residents about where they got their highway information, then mapped it. The retirees trusted a printed flyer from the municipal office; parents trusted the Facebook group; my classmates trusted a fifteen-second clip on TikTok that, when I traced it, misquoted the proposal entirely. ⁴Three communities lived in the same town and inhabited three different versions of the same fact. That is the problem I cannot stop thinking about: not whether people are informed, but how the channel itself decides what informed even means.⁵I am applying to Communication Studies at Concordia because the program treats media as something to be analyzed and made, joining theory with production rather than choosing between them. I want to study how platforms structure publics, and I also want to learn to produce media that is honest about its own form. ⁶I expect the courses on media institutions and political economy to give me the vocabulary I have been improvising in my notebook for two years. My town still does not have a newspaper. I am not naive enough to think a degree brings one back. But I want to understand the systems that replaced it well enough to build something more accountable, and to teach my neighbors to read the infrastructure, not just the posts. That is the work I want to start at Concordia.⁷

1Opens with a specific local case and frames communication as a field with structures and power, not just content the applicant enjoys. This directly answers what the prompt screens for.
2Signals genuine conceptual understanding (medium shapes message) without name-dropping, showing the applicant can think about communication analytically.
3Builds the analysis with three concrete mechanisms, using evidence over adjectives. Each claim is grounded in an observable platform feature, which is the kind of rigor the program rewards.
4Shows initiative and a small piece of original fieldwork. Evidence of doing rather than just consuming media strengthens the case for fit with a research-oriented program.
5Distills the project into a sharp research question, demonstrating a clear intellectual point of view rather than a generic interest in media.
6Names the specific program's hybrid theory-and-practice identity, establishing researched fit instead of interchangeable praise.
7Closes by returning to the opening image and stating concrete intentions, leaving a unified, purposeful impression that ties motivation to the program.

Stuck? Start here

What is one piece of media I can actually analyze, rather than just say I like?
Where have I made or managed media myself, and what surprised me about how people responded?
What real question about how communication works would I want to spend years studying?

Before you submit

Does my essay analyze media, not just describe how much I consume it?
Is there concrete evidence (a project, a campaign, a specific example) backing my claims?
Have I connected my interest to what this program actually teaches, and stayed within the length limit?

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