Media literacy compels us to look anew at the most mundane, that which surrounds us: the media and our popular culture. From there media literacy compels us to accept that the media are constructed and to seek various ways to analyze them, while considering our own beliefs to evaluate for ourselves an ultimate interpretation. This process has the potential to begin to strip away layers of accumulated media influence. In this paper, I demonstrate how graduate students, exposed to critical media literacy in their coursework, express how transformative it can become.