 The first step of your discourse community project is to choose a community to learn and write about. Basically, a discourse community is a group of people that communicates about a topic or subject area. For the purposes of English 1010, we'll be focusing on professional and academic discourse communities. This is a great opportunity to explore a major or career field that you might consider working in one day. If you're unsure what majors or careers interest you, there are a few different ways that you can discover discourse communities that you may want to join. First, here are some questions you can ask yourself to get started. What academic majors, disciplines, or departments are you interested in? Do you know what kinds of jobs people with those communities hold? To answer these questions, let's click academics from the top bar of USU's website and then select advising under resources on the far right. From here, we want to click explore majors at the top of the page and choose major slash career exploration from the drop-down menu. Now select degree finder to explore possible majors. Under keywords, we can type something that interests us to see what majors are associated with that interest. For instance, if we type in reading and press search, multiple majors pull up that we might be interested in, such as creative writing or English. We're searching a couple different interests that you have and seeing what academic communities are associated with them. Now if we go back to the previous page, we can also use the occupational outlook handbook to explore future careers within a major that interests you. For instance, if we click on farming, fishing, and forestry from the left hand bar, we can find career options for these areas, possible employers and information on those jobs. Maybe I could choose a community within conservation workers or I could write about people who work in the logging industry. After you explore different majors and careers, pick the community that interests you the most and get started on your assignment. If you have trouble finding your community, ask a librarian.