A wild time at Wildacres: Carolina WPA Conference recap

For two and a half days this week, I got to escape my tethered technological lifestyle and escape to the mountains of North Carolina to Wildacres, a conference center and retreat in Little Switzerland, NC. There, I attended the Carolinas Writing Program Administrators’ fall conference with fellow administrators at North Carolina State. It was my first year attending the conference, and I am glad for the opportunity to meet other WPAs from institutions around the Carolinas – it was an excellent networking opportunity.

The entrance to Wildacres. Source: Wildacres.org

We arrived late Monday afternoon, weaving up the top of a mountain. The conference center is a quaint assemblage of wooden cabins and larger buildings, some residential, some with open conference space, and one large mess hall. Yes, a mess hall – we were commanded to each meal by the ringing of a bell. (I didn’t know anyone still did that!) The mission of Wildacres is to provide a retreat and conference space for non-profit organizations, particularly in the arts, and to give attendees a chance to reconnect with nature. There are no TVs in the rooms at Wildacres, nor phones nor clocks, and our group quickly ate up the limited wifi bandwidth available – and crashed it for the remaining time that we were there!

This year’s conference theme was grant writing and funding, an increasingly important component of a WPA job. Our own Susan Miller-Cochran spoke the first evening about national WPA council grants that are available, providing insight from her years of experience on the council. Tuesday was a full day of workshops, including discussion from Tim Peeples at Elon, who spoke from his experience as an Associate Provost about how to apply for and win internal grant funding. Meg Morgan at UNC-Charlotte talked about finding national funding sources, and Michelle Eble from East Carolina University gave an overview of researching and writing grant proposals. The sessions combined informative discussion and writing (hey, we are WPAs, after all) that left us all feeling a little more confident about applying for grant money for our own programs.

Our two day mini-retreat was not all work, though – there was plenty of time for socializing, games, and and bonfire. While I certainly learned a lot about grants, the best part for me was the social time, talking to other WPAs from the Carolinas and making important connections for when I’m on the job market in two years (still such a long ways away!). Groups members are clearly close friends, and were open and welcoming to newbies/grad students in attendance. On the first night, we had an informal ping pong (table tennis for all the serious players out there) tournament, which yours truly is proud to say she is the champion of. Guess I’ll have to go next year to defend my title! Our final night, the staff at Wildacres held a bonfire for us, and we enjoyed more socialization, roasting marshmallows, and some banjo and guitar entertainment provided by a couple of members. We awoke Wednesday morning to a dreary, rainy day at the top of the mountain, and after a quick breakfast and “beat you in ping pong next year!” we were on the road back to Raleigh.

The rocking chairs were a popular spot for socializing. Source: Wildacres.org.

It was truly a good time had by all, and I got the sense that the writing program administrators’ community is not just a professional group, but a community in the true sense of the word, where members look out for one another and are working together to achieve their goals and to improve writing programs at all institutions. This was also a good time for me to get to know my fellow NCSU administrators better, too. Special thanks to the First Year Writing Program at NCSU and director Susan Miller-Cochran for the opportunity to participate!

~ Meagan
*This post originally appeared on my own blog, Meg’s Road to PhD.

RSA Chapter Kicks Off at NCSU with Sound Advice for Responding to Calls

(Not from Advice Dog, thankfully.)

As we promised earlier, NC State’s Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) chapter held its first meeting with several CRDM students in attendance. Dr. Carolyn Miller, one of our program’s co-founders and the current editor of the journal Rhetoric Society Quarterly, was there as well to offer advice on responding to calls for articles and conference presentations on rhetoric. Dr. Miller suggests you should:

1. Have something to say. What people are looking for are interesting claims. You want to position an abstract or proposal in a way that shows that you have already done enough to have something to say rather than just laying out a trajectory of exploration.
2. Position yourself. As the Burkean statement goes, you are part of a conversation. You are making a contribution in an ongoing exchange. If you are giving a response and you don’t know who you are talking to then that is not really an example of well-positioned disciplinary discourse.
3. Make sure that the conference organizer or editor is able to see a clear connection between your proposal or article and the call, if it concerns a specific topic or theme. Sometimes, repeating key words from the call (or clear synonyms) can be useful. Some calls, on the other hand, cast a very wide net. Check out Berkenkotter & Huckin’s study of submissions to 4Cs (ch. 6 in Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication).
4. Know the place you are sending your proposal or paper in to. Know your audience. That goes without saying in journal submissions, but still needs to be said is to read the journal. Don’t submit a journal article to a journal you have never read.
5. Early on in your career it can be important and useful to look at fit between your work and a variety of different audiences by going to a variety of different conferences. However, when in doubt it does not hurt your research identity to continue to go to the largest of national conferences in your field. When in doubt (or restricted travel funding) sacrifice the regional conferences.
6. Balance conference attendance; do not over-commit and find yourself unable to produce. You can always withdraw a conference paper if you are unable to produce quality work, but do so ahead of time and with notice.
7. Check out listservs such as hrhetor, CRTNET, and U Penn’s website for more info on calls. If you joint RSA, you will receive timely messages about RSA conferences and other calls.

Thanks to Dr. Miller for these helpful tips and for helping us resurrect our chapter of RSA.

A Call to Rhetoric!

Quick Summary:

On Thursday, January 27th from 1:30-2:30 in Tompkins Hall 131B the NCSU chapter of the Rhetoric Society of America is holding an open kick-off event. We will provide light refreshments and we will have packets of calls for papers and for proposals for rhetoric-based conferences and special issues. The event will give folks a time to meet with other students interested in rhetoric to work through the calls, form panels, and prepare for future presentations. The event is open to any and all with interest in rhetoric.

The Event

During “A Call to Rhetoric” we will provide packets of rhetoric calls for conferences, journals, and special issues. Come and provide your ideas as you work through calls individually, together, or work on ideas for constructing panel submissions. Our goal for this activity is to help everyone in attendance prepare to submit at least one paper to an upcoming conference, and we’ll meet this goal by working together and analyzing CFPs and putting our heads together regarding panels and individual presentations.

All are welcome to attend. Interested in rhetoric but not yet an RSA member? No problem, come and learn more about membership and meet other students with shared interests. Already an RSA member? You can transfer your membership to NC State and/or find out more about our chapter’s goals for this year. Not sure if you’re interested in rhetoric but have an idea or a paper you want to submit? Come anyway to check out the calls and enjoy light refreshments and camaraderie.

To find out more about this event or to be notified of other upcoming RSA chapter meetings please contact Kati Fargo

kmfargo@ncsu.edu.

We hope to see you there!

(Check back after the 27th for notes on the event, and possibly a picture or two.)

CRDM Speed Dating

On Tuesday, December 7th from 4:45-5:45 six first years and six faculty members took part in the first ever CRDM research interest “speed dating” event. At this event students were encouraged to try out elevator pitches, find common interests for committee formation and research projects, and get job search and campus visit advice from faculty members.

It's a well-known rule of academic speed dating etiquette to cross your arms or fingers while engaging in conversation.

Faculty members brought candy, handouts, business cards, wordles, and a lot of great advice and intellectual resources.

Here are some “sound bites” from the event:

“Sound more positive even if you don’t feel it yet. When you are on a campus visit or interviewing at a conference you need to learn to sound comfortable when talking to almost strangers. Your job is to get them interested in your work. . . . What do you want to do in ten years? Why?” –Interviewing and job search advice from Dr. Hans Kellner

Bells ensure each conversation is well-timed. Hooray for the importance of sound!

“When you are preparing for your third year you have three tasks and none of them can clearly come first. They are all approached through a series of approximations. Decide on your dissertation topic, pick your exam areas, and select members for your committee.” –Advice on the exam and dissertation process from Dr. Carolyn R. Miller

 

Special thanks to Kati for pulling this all together.

Special thanks to: Dr. Kellner, Dr. Miller, Dr. Wiley, Dr. Swarts, Dr. Kinsella, Dr. Katz, and the first-year cohort for making this event a success!

SAS, CHASS Amass

Last month, members of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHASS) at NC State met up at with employees from the Publications Division of SAS Institute in Cary for a half-day symposium to explore research opportunities of mutual interest. The gathering was a rekindling of sorts as the SAS-CHASS relationship that, while dormant of late, was once much more active (our own Dr. Carolyn Miller is the SAS Institute Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Technical Communication). Recent efforts to renew the partnership come from Dean Jeff Braden and SAS VP for Publications Kathy Council, who recognized a mutually beneficial opportunity to align the research ambitions of CHASS PhD students with the research challenges of SAS.

I went along to represent the CRDM program and to talk about my work in corporate social media analysis, which, along with topics like globalization and usability, is one of many topics SAS is interested in exploring. (In fact, the SAS Director of Media Intelligence Solutions Mark Chaves was our most recently featured speaker for the CRDM Colloquium, and he shared some fascinating insights on social media research challenges in regards to their new analytics tool.) I was joined by PhD colleagues in the Psychology and Sociology departments and by multiple faculty across CHASS.

Sure, my 7 minutes of public speaking was probably the most important discussion of corporate social media ever to take place relevant to some, but I was honestly much more interested in listening to SAS personnel talk about their research problems and how they might intersect with our methodologies and research specialties in CHASS. For example, our primary audience was the Publications division of SAS but we were joined by members of R & D as well, who later raised a laundry list of research project needs they had in the queue. Listening to their project descriptions, I realized that a manuscript I was working on with Dr. Jason Swarts lined up neatly with their research questions. From this initial curiosity came a conversation, an exchanging of improbably handsome business cards, and an email thread that produced a brownbag research forum on assessing instructional video content for technical communication. Dr. Swarts and I hosted around a dozen members of SAS who joined CHASS scholars in the audience on NC State’s campus as we presented our ongoing research. A lively conversation ensued. Lively, I say. Lively!

Sample screenshot of our tutorial coding project (program pictured: ELAN)

Honestly, I was really impressed with the level of overlapping interest in a topic I thought for sure would be entirely esoteric to everyone outside of our collaborative writing process. The Q&A got us thinking about issues we clearly should have addressed during the writing process; at the same time, we took comfort in the reassurance that some of the most critical decisions we made about what not to include in the results or analysis were applicable beyond they typically insulated academic audience. The best part? We were just the first of many future collaborative brownbags, and I’ll be really interested to see where the fruits of a renewed town-gown relationship will take our program.

All told, things are looking up for the future of SAS partnerships. With a bit of luck and a lot of inventio, you should look for the “town-gown” tag to reappear on this blog in the future as we move the CRDM program forward into more SAS-CHASS collaborations, with or without the exchanging of handsomely designed business cards. Yes. Handsome I say!

~Matt Morain, Class of 2008

Live Blogging the First CRDMSA PDW!

4:07 Introduction to the Academic Job Search with Dr. Jessica Moore, Department of Communication and Dr. Rebecca Walsh, Department of English.

4:10 After the application is in… Be sure to have materials at the ready–writing sample, sample syllabi–so that you can turn them around quickly.

Insider tip: A spreadsheet with all postings, deadlines, what they requested, what you’ve submitted. Keeping track is difficult, but having all the information in one place allows you to have some control. Also helps with preparing for interviews and campus visits. BONUS: The job search is expensive, and this also helps you track expenses (for taxes or reimbursement).

4:15 Also have an understanding of which jobs you want–follow your internal compass. Focus your energies on pursuing the jobs you are really interested in.

4:18 Question from Lauren: Why apply for jobs you don’t want? JM answers that you must understand your purpose. Do you have to start a job this year? Do you want to wait for the “perfect” job? There’s nothing wrong with casting a wide net. You never know where you’ll be a fit.

RW: Constructing the narrative of who you are/are going to be. Finding unexpected fits can teach you new things about yourself.

4:21 Lauren: Is there a stigma associated with leaving a tenure-track job before you get tenure?

RW: Advantages and disadvantages of moving at the junior level. You can be more portable at that level. The perception, however, could be that you are a job hopper, especially for places that are nervous about retention. It might be appropriate to touch on it briefly and vaguely in your application letter.

JM: Just be mindful of your pattern of moving. Be sure to address why you are applying for a job once you have a job.

Nick: Is there an ideal time for considering a move as a junior faculty member?

JM: The main thing is how well you fit the job. It’s not uncommon to go on the market when you are up for tenure, just articulate why you are considering the move and keep your pattern in mind.

(I’m paraphrasing here, not transcribing!)

RW: One thing to keep in mind when weighing whether to take a job that’s not ideal is the financial commitments and time constraints being on the market requires.

Nick: How many jobs should we be applying for?

JM: It depends on what’s available, what you think you’re a fit for. If you’re not sure you’re a fit, it might be appropriate to call and ask. Don’t apply to jobs you won’t take under any circumstances. It’s a waste of everyone’s time.

RW: It also depends on your field. If you are in a competitive field, you may need to apply for more jobs. Remember, too, that every interview is practice for the next.

4:39 The campus visit.

RW: Create a mock job talk! Even if the department or program doesn’t do that for you, schedule your own. Reserve a room, advertise it, and put together a talk. Hold the Q and A and the whole nine. It’ll make things sooo much easier!

It’s another way to control the uncontrollable.

JM: Make sure that people you don’t know personally are also in the room. People you know should be available to give your personal feedback, but you don’t want a room full of familiar faces. It’s important to have people from other subfields and disciplines that may ask differently framed questions because that is what will happen on the campus visit.

4:43 Negotiating campus visits.

Know where you’re going. Know about the faculty, get to know their profiles, think about what they do aligns with what you do (and it’ll help you frame your questions). If you can, get people talking about what THEY do–not just what you do.

(As an aside, I love this idea. People always think you’re more interesting when you are asking them about themselves!)

Know what classes they offer, institutes on the campus, programs in the department.

RW: There are also don’ts. Don’t drink too much. Don’t go without a bottle of water and portable snacks. (You may not even have the appetite or opportunity to eat during meals!) Don’t ask about tenure standards. Don’t ask about course release opportunities.

Read The Chronicle and some popular news outlets so that you have something to talk about other than work and research.

Also be aware of what is going on at your own institution so that you sound more professionalized, powering specific questions. Think Faculty Senate issues…

JM: Also make it clear that your thinking about trajectory and making the connections to their campus. Show that you know about their campus, department. Show that you’ve taken initiative to seek out information.

Check out, Questions to ask (and to be prepared to answer) during an academic interview.

4:54

Search committee narrows poll to top 5-10. Full faculty will vote on which they want to be the top 2 or 3 candidates. Once you’re on the visit, it’s all about who’s the best fit for the department. Once you have an offer, don’t say “yes.” Be ready to negotiate. Everything. Ask detailed questions. After negotiations, you’ll receive an offer letter. Make sure that everything you have negotiated is in the letter. You can also get published salary information from HR so that you understand where you are in the range.

RW: One good idea is to send a recap e-mail after phone negotiations. Always have a reason for things that you ask for/about.

JM: If you have a campus interview, make notes about the things you didn’t get to ask. That way, you’ll be sure to ask them when they call with the offer.

Prepare a list of questions for all interviews. Office/lab space? Computer of my selection? Software (e.g., SPSS)? Research or teaching assistants? Teaching load and course preps?

Most schools have placement services for spousal (or partner!) hiring assistance, even non-academic positions.

5:22 Voting on the hire.

Vote on whether candidates are hirable. Once candidate is chosen, department or search committee chair will call to make offer.

Be sure to take your reasonable time. Get to know the area where you would live. Find out before the campus interview whether you should be prepared to prepay or can expect for someone to pay for meals, etc. while you are there. Be prepared to pay and be reimbursed.

5:28. Kathy: Conference interviews. What’s that all about?

JM: Conference interviews are preliminary interviews used to choose top 3 or so candidates to bring to campus. Communicate that you really want to work with them. Send a note immediately after. Let them know in your note that you’ve done more research. If you’re tied to the area, let them know that you want to put down roots there.

5:31 If you’re comfortable, let faculty in the department/program know where you are applying. That way they’ll be able to talk about you if they get a call and may make a call for you! The grapevine is active!

5: 38 Thanks to Drs. Moore and Walsh for talking with us today. If you missed it, you missed out. This has been fun and informative. InFUNative, if you will!

Putting the “Arduino” in “CRDM”

A number of students and several faculty in the CRDM program have formed a group, led by Dr. David Rieder, to learn about and experiment with the Arduino microprocessor board (http://www.arduino.cc). The goal is to explore what electrical and physical computing can offer to expand our understanding of the humanities through various projects undertaken by group members.

1st Year Seth Mulliken makes the pretty lights go on. Hooray physical computing!

While the concept of physical computing may seem daunting to many parties who may be interested but lack programming or electrical engineering expertise, the Arduino is extremely accessible for non-programmers and newcomers to computing, and the Processing language used by the Arduino is very easy to learn. No prior expertise is required to participate!

The group will be meeting in Tompkins 112 every other Saturday, with our next meeting on March 13. For more information, email David Rieder (david_rieder@ncsu.edu).

Social Media Roundtable

Each year, NC State’s Department of Communication organizes CommWeek, a five-day blitz of communication-related events, panels, discussions, and guest speakers. CRDM was asked to participate by hosting a roundtable discussion on social media, given our program’s focus and the interesting research that many of are engaged in in which many of us are engaged (sorry; as Winston Churchill more or less quipped, ending a sentence with a preposition is the sort of nonsense up with which I shall not put).

So, on the last Friday afternoon in February we gathered in the conference room in Caldwell M8 to discuss some of the key issues we’ve been seeing in our own usage and research in social media. Ten of us from the CRDM program came to participate, and we were joined by three M.A. Comm students as well. We also opened up the roundtable to interested faculty members, and I appreciate Drs. Steve Wiley, David Berube, Richard Waters and Ken Zagacki for coming to offer their two cents.

CRDM PhD students, Communication MA students and faculty gather for the social media roundtable, held at a decidedly rectangular one.

We kicked things off with a video from CollegeHumor, “Twitter in Real Life.” I played this to get us talking about the content and quality of a lot of social media artifacts. I think we tend to get wrapped up in our obsession with the next shiny metal thing in social media–Foursquare, Buzz–and we forget that what we do and what we study is incomprehensible to large swaths of people, both on and offline.

From here we segued into how social media changes the relationship between individuals and corporate power. Dr. Waters, whose research focuses on strategic public relations and fundraising, brought up the recent snafu with director and writer Kevin Smith (of Silent Bob semi-fame) and Southwest Airlines. In brief, Smith was kicked off his flight after being told he was “too fat to fly.” He took to Twitter  to blast Southwest for its service to his more than 1.6 million followers and news of the event began appearing all around the web. Southwest immediately tried to put out the PR fire, and Dr. Waters used this as an example of how social media forces traditional PR communications to blur the line with customer service.

We agreed that social media services and platforms are empowering individuals in a more profound way than traditional methods of raising awareness typically could, like a letter to the editor or a write-your-congressman campaign. However, Dr. Berube pointed out that corporations are playing catch-up in the social media game to try and appear responsive and open to their customer experiences. This sparked an interesting conversation thread about the ways in which social media can actually serve to reinforce existing power structures. In short, the digital media provides a voice to the voiceless, but specific social networks can hit a critical cacophony  that drown out what made them unique in the first place.

Dr. Steve Wiley joined us to share his interests in social media and studies of space (the non-NASA kind).

More topics were covered in the space of an hour than I can do justice to here, but I found it refreshing to hear about a unique blend of research interests and issues within the context of face-to-face interaction. As social media researchers, our objects of focus necessitate that we be constantly tethered to screens, @-ing each other in truncated conversations. The roundtable gave us a chance to collectively mull over our work; issues like the surveillance implications of location-aware applications like Foursquare collided with the speculation that Facebook and Google seem to be emulating each other–Google added Buzz for status updates and social connections through GMaps, while Facebook moved into real-time search and targeted ads. (On this last point, I’m convinced that Facebook : Arthur Slugworth :: Google : Willy Wonka, but that’s another conversation entirely.) We didn’t come up with the solution to any issues of power, gender, or race within social media, and we didn’t find the magical solution for writing the next brilliant book. But that’s not the point, and maybe it shouldn’t be. Shayne made a quip during our conversation about social media’s limited ability to level out social inequalities that may seem to apply to our first roundtable:

It may be useless, but at least it’s a start.

I hope to see more of these informal discussions and roundtables like this. They offer a unique opportunity to get together with students from multiple cohorts, throw out a bunch of ideas and questions and see what comes out of it. Kind of like an Irish stew. Yup. CRDM roundtables are Irish stews. And they’re delicious.

~Matt Morain (@morainium)

A Lunch Professionalism Talk by Jeremy Packer

1:45 Introduction by Kathy Oswald

1:49 Academics professionalism as involvement in networks. Desire for achievement isn’t what motivates Packer. It’s political action, answering intellectual questions.

1:51 The very, very length commitment to the dissertation topic. Jeremy’s been working on his dissertation topic for 15 years. He must have chose well because he can still gets excited about it.

1:53 “Why do you need to love your dissertation topic? Because you won’t be able to escape it for a very, very, very long time.”

1:54 “There’s a path associated with the project. Be sure to work out the theoretical and political commitments and investments of the work early on. It creates a focus and gets you involved in the right conversations.”

1:56 Jeremy shares early presentations from his CV. It includes presentations on Boyz N the Hood and Do the Right Thing, a comic strip, and Disney. It’s helpful to see that someone with such a consistent and coherent research agenda wasn’t born with it!

2:06 Best case scenario from dissertation to book publication is. Six for proposal/manuscript submission acceptance. A year to two years for first revisions. Six months for second round of reviews. Another six months for second round of revisions.  In between, you have to do marketing research in order to help your publisher promote the book. After that, the rewards will follow, which means you’re still committed to the book years after. Perhaps awards nomination, invited talks, response to reviews, if you’re lucky.

2:13 You’ll spend your life being known as the X scholar (e.g., the car guy, the Foucault guy).

2:14 Jeremy reiterates that you have to care about your topic/project very deeply because you’ll live with it for years (and it becomes such an important part of your professional identity).

2:17 A question: How much should you consider the market when choosing your topic. A: Probably not a good idea. Markets change so quickly. Think not so much in terms of topic market, but political/theoretical/methodological arenas. What arenas of scholarship do you want to contribute to? How is your work going to intervene in the production of knowledge? What is the terrain of battle? Can your work enter into debates across topical, disciplinary, theoretical, political, and methodological boundaries?

2:25 Jeremy recommends aiming high. Think about the work that comes to matter. To what beliefs are you going to devote your scholarship? What fights will you wage (political, intellectual, creative, professional)? He makes the important point that there won’t be another opportunity after the dissertation to devote this kind of time to thinking (and reading) in a field, to becoming an expert.

2:29 The types of relationships you participate in shape your work you do in significant ways. With whom are you going to share your time, energy, and trust? Who will you go to battle with? For example, Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality came out of a reading group made up of mostly graduate students. It helped that Larry Grossberg, Jeremy’s mentor, and Toby Miller agreed to be interviewed. A note to the young and so-to-be wise: If you can’t get a top scholar to write an article, ask them if they’re do an interview to be published in your collection.

2:44 Once again, Jeremy highlights the importance of building strong connections early. Not glad-handing at conferences but rather making deeper connections and building friendships and collegial relationships. Jeremy’s strongest mentoring happened through his relationships with his fellow graduate students. In that case, you’re acting as both a mentor and mentee. The more you do it now, the better you’ll be at it in the future, which could happen a couple of years after you’ve finished writing your own dissertation.