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Career Preparation & Placement

Preparation for the Profession: Teaching and Scholarship

The English Department offers all graduate students a variety of teaching opportunities and professional preparation activities, all designed to provide students with important professional experience and to place them in a highly competitive position for entering the job market.

Scholarship

All students entering the dissertation phase of the program participate in area studies seminars in which faculty and graduate students discuss student projects and student writing in a workshop atmosphere. In the spring semester of their penultimate year of study, students enroll in a "Writing for the Profession" practicum, which concentrates on preparing papers for academic conferences, submitting essays for publication to academic journals, and developing strategies for entering the job market. Students take another practicum in the fall of the last year of study which concentrates on preparation for the job market, writing letters of application and teaching portfolios, preparing for interviews, and developing job talks.

Teaching

"Teaching Literature" is an integral component of the introductory course to Graduate Studies, required of all beginning students. Students learn to teach writing in a practicum, taken the semester before teaching Writing and Rhetoric, and in a set of intensive orientation meetings, usually at the beginning of the second year. Graduate students in English typically teach upper-level literature courses early in their graduate careers, often in the third year of graduate studies. Students teach at least two semesters of Writing and Rhetoric. They never teach more than one class a semester and class enrollments are limited to seventeen students.

Recent Placements

In the last five years, we have placed graduate students in a variety of tenure-track positions, such as:

Our recent graduates also teach full-time at institutions as varied as Ohio University, Goshen College, Florida Atlantic University, and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Recent graduates also are employed as academic advisors, high school teachers, independent writers, editors, and lawyers.