LAUSR

A successful political communication practitioner needs to acquire several skills in graduate school. For example, they should have a solid knowledge of existing theories in the field of political communication. They should also have a general understanding of the statistical analyses used in the field. Today political communication scholars and those running political campaigns need both of these skills to address the increasingly complex questions in an increasingly complex communication environment. As I look forward toward how I want to train my graduate students, and what I think is needed for them to succeed—beyond the basics of theoretical and statistical training with a healthy dose of curiosity—is for students to be comfortable being a boundary spanner that pulls ideas, research methods, and literature across disciplines and typical theoretical divides. Political communication has always been an interdisciplinary endeavor with many scholars pulling from psychology and sociology in addition to communication and political science, but I believe it will be important to break some extant divides as the field continues to progress. There are two particular, and related, ways to span boundaries that I think will benefit students moving forward. The first is a willingness to straddle both interpersonal and mass communication literatures, and the second is to embrace more technology and computer coding-focused techniques. One area in which political communication scholars tend to pick sides is whether they see themselves as someone who focuses on mass media or interpersonal communication. Given how our media environment is shifting—and has been shifting—I think it will be important to think about our communication environments more broadly. In light of the 2016 election, there is a growing need to span traditional mass and interpersonal boundaries. The importance of social media was apparent in this last election cycle (Kreiss & McFregor, 2018). For instance, some in the media have made it a point to identify social media as a source of misinformation. In some ways, political communication is more wellsituated than other content areas to embrace the interplay of mass and interpersonal communication. Indeed, the foundational work of the two-step flow of information