[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to a special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]
I’ve
covered the five courses I taught this semester in the first four posts in this
series (since I had two sections of First-Year Writing), and so for the final
post I wanted to focus on my role as the Chair of our Graduate English Studies
programs at FSU (we offer both an MA in Literature and a Creative Writing
Certificate). But in so doing, I am also shifting the tone of the series:
because while we’ve certainly been facing for many years a serious challenge
in terms of enrollments in our Graduate English MA, I’m very very proud to
note that we have dramatically reversed that situation; a few years back we
were in single digits in the number of students in the program, which had been
temporarily frozen as a result, while as of this moment at the end of the Fall
2025 semester we have 25 enrolled students!
Mostly I’m
just really excited about that trend and wanted to share it. But in case it
might be useful for other folks facing similar situations, I also wanted to
share two things that have, I believe, contributed to this significant upswing;
the first is a practical thing we’ve done consistently and well, and the second
a philosophical shift that I’ve made a permanent part of our program.
The
practical thing has been to make and share (not only live, but also and I would
argue especially as recordings) a ton of webinars, most of them featuring the
voices of our Grad students themselves (mostly current ones, but with some alums
sprinkled in as well). These webinars have represented our program and our
community far better than I ever could by myself, and have I believe modeled
for prospective students what the experience and community are like for our
Grad students. Every time we’ve recorded a new one I’ve seen at least one or
two new applications for the program over the subsequent weeks, sometimes from
folks who were in the live audience for the webinar but most often from folks
who saw them down the road (generally linked on our website). I can’t recommend
this practice strongly enough.
The philosophical
shift is a significant one, but it’s also one I very much stand by. For the
first couple years of having the CW Certificate, its courses were pretty much entirely
separate from the MA ones, and reserved for students in that Certificate
program. But in order to recruit more students for the MA, I decided to allow
MA students to take CW courses and have them count as Electives toward the
degree. Since we only require 9 such Electives total (along with one required
course), this shift means that a number of our students might well take
significantly fewer Literature courses; but it also and especially means that
they will be able to design their own version of the MA, one that might include
Creative Writing if it is of interest, and in any case that can be more
individualized (which was always a goal, but I believe this shift makes it much
clearer still). I’ve put through a proposal to cement this practice as policy,
and believe it will help us continue to recruit and grow our numbers, while
also doing what we want to do in these wonderful Graduate English programs.
Special
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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