Each program in DePaul’s College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences gives an annual Outstanding Graduate Student Award, and we are happy to announce that the recipient of this year’s award in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse is Dylan Cabrera! Dylan, who will graduate in June, is a Graduate Assistant for the First-Year Writing Program, a Writing Center tutor, a hard-working and enthusiastic student, and a joy to have around. We want to congratulate him on receiving this award! Read on to hear about his journey through the MAWRD program in his own words.
After dabbling in film school for a semester, taking a gap year, attending community college for a week, then majoring in secondary education for a while, I finally made up my mind and finished my undergrad degree in English Literature at Loyola University Chicago. But this still didn’t feel quite right. I realized that I didn’t want to be the one who studies, reads, and analyzes literature; I wanted to be the one who’s writing, who’s creating my own work. Despite my nervous personality and tendency to flub social interactions, I knew I had a lot to say to a lot of people. Motivated by questions of justice, language, and power, and determined to get my ideas on paper, I discovered DePaul’s Writing Rhetoric and Discourse MA program. This is exactly what I was looking for, a chance to study how to communicate my thoughts through writing in the most effective way possible. When the WRD department offered me a position as the Graduate Assistant for the First-Year Writing Program, full tuition, and a job as a Writing Center tutor, I knew that despite being unfamiliar and intimidated by this new field I had just discovered, this was just too good an opportunity to pass up.
I remember reading through the MA in WRD program’s website, trying to pin down exactly what I had just committed two years of my life to. That’s when I realized that we didn’t have a grand thesis paper at the end of our (writing) program; instead, we would have to give an exit presentation before receiving our degree. The thought of it horrified me. I found it difficult to speak up in class during undergrad, so how was I going to do a big presentation in front of faculty, my family, and peers? I told myself, “I cannot do this right now, but if my goals are met and I grow as a person and communicator, I can hazily envision myself as a more confident, comfortable speaker by the end of the two-year program.” Thankfully, I can now say that I have grown into that very person I wanted to become.
The opportunities that DePaul and WRD had to offer were more than I could have imagined. It started with immediately finding community among the Writing Center tutors, which was something I never quite found as an undergraduate at Loyola University. I remember taking my first class with Dr. Monica Reyes, WRD 500: Proseminar, and writing about what I wanted to accomplish by the end of the program. I half-heartedly wrote about presenting at conferences, creating my own pieces of writing that promote social justice, and teaching at the college level. I laughed to myself, imagining these goals as unreachable but worth striving for.
My clearest goal, writing my own pieces (the one I thought I could actually reach), was being met in every course. WRD allowed me a space to think critically about the world and to express my ideas, pushing me to hone my skills and improve with each paper I wrote. However, I never expected that my Graduate Assistantship would offer me the opportunity to collaborate on the curriculum of a reading-bridge program, allowing me to present alongside Drs. Tim Elliott and Julie Bosker at the Illinois Association of Teachers of English (IATE) conference in autumn of 2025. And I never thought I would join the Teaching Apprenticeship Program, where I would fall in love with teaching, as I taught a section of WRD 103: Composition and Rhetoric I to First-Year DePaul students. I realized something: after presenting alongside Tim Elliott and Julie Bokser at the IATE conference and teaching my first couple of classes of the quarter, my fear of speaking in front of people and sharing my ideas with a crowd no longer scared me. I actually found it exciting and exhilarating, and my passion for teaching grew as I got to know and work with my students. I had, surprisingly, reached the goals I had set for myself, so I added a new one to the list: pursuing teaching at the college level.
I have not only grown at DePaul as a student, as a writer, and as a thinker; I have grown as a person. The friends I’ve met, and the wonderful faculty I’ve worked with, have given me the space in WRD to become more than the Dylan I was: nervous undergrad, afraid to voice his opinions. Now I am Dylan post-WRD: writer, rhetor, speaker, tutor, instructor, and recipient of the Outstanding Graduate Student Award.
Who would’ve thought?
-Dylan Cabrera