My mom got the Alumni Achievement Award from the UNO School of Communication. I went to the awards ceremony last night. Generally, I hate awards ceremonies, but communication awards ceremonies have distinct advantages.

First, everyone is (or was) a communications major. While I’ve never backed down from making fun of communications majors, they DO give good speeches. Instead of listening to some surly accounting professor drone on about ethics, I got to listen to people who have taken or taught numerous speech classes.

I never really knew what communications majors did for a living. In fact, last night I learned what forensics means (I always think of Quincy). But apparently women who want to be television anchor people are communications majors because there was some eye candy there.

Speaking of women, there were about three male students who received awards or scholarships compared to 20 or so women. I didn’t realize communications was such a female dominated track. Maybe there are an equal number of male enrollees and they’re just not good enough to win awards.

Finally, hats off to Dr. Deborah Smith-Howell who organized the event. I heard that past events were filled with numerous long, boring speaches. Dr. Smith-Howell kept things moving along nicely. The honorees were honered, I ate the standard chicken dinner, and we all got home in time to watch the Red Wings-Flames face-off.