We recently spoke with Dr. Kevin Smith, an alum of the MA in WRD program who works as an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia. Dr. Smith graduated in 2012 with an MA in New Media Studies.
What was your academic and professional background prior to entering WRD?
I enrolled in the New Media Studies program in the fall of 2010. At the time, I was working full-time at DePaul in Student Accounts. I continued to work full-time throughout my degree. That actually played into some of my proseminar projects, which were focused on professional writing. For example, I created a guide document for DePaul Central.
Describe your career and research interests as you were going through the MA in WRD (formerly MA in New Media Studies) program. How did you customize the program to meet your needs?
I thought I wanted to use the program as a professionalization opportunity, so I could go into web design, which is primarily what I was interested in. The NMS program was really different from WRD now. The majority of students were working full-time, and we had a good mix of people: some were visual artists, some were more interested in rhetoric and composition. That was an interesting environment. I think the course offerings were also skewed toward practical topics, and I took two web design courses where we actually designed and created web pages.
As I went through the program, I became more exposed to rhetorical theory and scholarship in rhetoric and composition. I took a class really late in my undergraduate degree, called Writing Across Media, which got me interested in forms of writing that I hadn’t previously been exposed to in my undergraduate degree. (I graduated from the University of Illinois with a BA in English Literature.) That class had seeded some interest in more theoretical concepts and research, and as I went through the MANMS program, I rediscovered this interest and realized I wanted to go on to do a PhD
And you recently earned your PhD from Northeastern University—congratulations! Can you tell us a bit about the application and decision process?
The faculty were great once I identified that I might want to go on to do a PhD. Tony Ceraso and Lisa Dush in particular were really helpful, because they had gone through that experience. Lisa was new to DePaul when I started, so she had just gone through the job market. She was really helpful in shaping the work I had done at DePaul into a coherent whole, even if it didn’t feel coherent while I was doing it
I applied to a set of PhD programs in and around Boston. It was clear to me, as I was applying, that my profile fit best at Northeastern. I was really interested in the field of digital humanities, in intersections of theory, composition practice, and digital forms of writing. That’s how I positioned myself as a skill-based applicant. Northeastern was the major player in the Boston area for the digital humanities, and its English department had a lot of faculty members who were pursuing digital humanities projects. Applying was certainly stressful, but it was made much easier with the help of Lisa and Tony, who helped me shape the narrative of the classes that I took at DePaul to be recognizable as a PhD applicant.
How have you used your experiences from WRD/NMS in your current position? How did WRD/NMS prepare you for the academic world?
NMS gave me a technical background that was really helpful at Northeastern. It allowed me to come into my graduate program and immediately start working on digital humanities projects. I started working on this project called Viral Texts with Ryan Cordell and David Smith (a Computer Science professor) that traced instances of reprinted materials in 19th century periodicals. It wasn’t necessarily my research area, but it allowed me to see what a big research project looks like and helped me work directly with faculty from multiple disciplines. I continued to develop and hone different skills in digital humanities and ended up working on three or four projects, one of which led to my dissertation.
My dissertation is about a series of writing courses I taught in which students used XML as a way to collaboratively model and interrogate different genres of writing and then produce those genres. My dissertation partly came out of my work as a second-year PhD student working with TEI, another markup language. I was involved in conversations about how to use markup in particular instances, what do we mean by this tag, etc. I realized that those conversations were what I wanted my students to think about in my writing classrooms! I wanted to explore how we could use this to help students have in-depth conversations about what they’re signaling in their writing and how they’re thinking about rhetorical moves. I can draw a direct line from some of the classes I took in WRD to my digital humanities projects and then to my dissertation.
On the teaching side, I took a class called Text + Image with Michael Moore. I draw on that class in my teaching all the time. At the University of Virginia, I teach First-Year Writing and advanced writing courses, some focused on digital writing. When I teach those classes, I draw on the readings and activities from Text + Image, because they helped me think about how systems of mediation change the way people write and the way people perceive different kinds of texts. In terms of teaching, I think about how my students are mediated by the technologies they use to write, how technologies affect the writing students are able to produce, and how student writing is perceived and circulated.
What do you think is different about PhD programs now? How can current students best prepare for the kind of work you do?
The biggest thing that was useful for me was developing and cultivating relationships with my advisors and professors, especially ones who were sitting in jobs that interested me. I recommend taking multiple courses with the same professor and asking professors for help when you need it. That was most useful for me.
If you’re interested in getting a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition, especially one housed in an English program, my biggest piece of advice is to do the Teaching Apprenticeship Program. That teaching experience will distinguish you from a lot of other applicants. It also helps to have a focus and complete one of the degree concentrations. The Teaching Language and Writing Concentration makes a lot of sense for rhetoric and composition. The Professional and Digital Writing Concentration can also be really attractive to PhD programs, depending on where you want to go.
In practical terms, professional and technical writing is the subfield of rhetoric and composition that is hiring the most. Look at the job listings for the kinds of research interests you imagine you might have. Look at them and be realistic about them. Being realistic doesn’t mean don’t do it—it means you should be thinking throughout your PhD program about the job market. If you’re looking for employment in academia, you have to be thinking from the minute you get into your program, how can I best position myself? Some of your professionalization work can also happen in your Master’s program. If you’re interested in community-engaged teaching, take classes where you actually work with communities. Teach at DePaul, if you have the opportunity. It will never hurt to have taught at multiple institutions.