WRD Alumni Spotlight: Molly Rentscher

Molly Rentscher is the latest alumna to be featured in the WRD Spotlight series. She graduated in 2015 with a Master’s in Writing, Rhetoric, & Discourse. Currently, Molly works as a writing center coordinator at Arizona State University. What have you been doing professionally since you earned your degree? I earned my degree in June of 2015, and shortly thereafter, I accepted a full-time position at Arizona State University (ASU) as a writing center coordinator. In my position, I am responsible for managing all aspects of operations for the West campus Writing Center and Graduate Writing Center; this includes hiring,

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2016 WRD Awards Party Recap

The Sixth Annual WRD Awards Party was a great success thanks to the participation of WRD majors and minors, MA in WRD graduate students, and MA in NMS graduate students! This year’s party was held on Friday, June 3 in the Lincoln Park Student Center. As always, it was a great evening to honor WRD and NMS graduates, enjoy food, listen to live music, and catch up with classmates, alumni, and faculty. Photos from the evening can be viewed below. The award winners and Pi Epsilon Pi inductees are listed below: Best Undergraduate Essay “Feliz Cumpleaños!” by Wendy Ramirez Best

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News and Updates

News and Updates from MA Alumni and Faculty

Here’s an update on what some of our MA in NMS and MA in WRD students, graduates, and faculty members have been up to in the last six months!   NMS Students and Alumni Yasmin Alesia (2016) switched careers from the advertising to the tech industry. With the help of her NMS degree, she has started a new job as a UX/UI Designer for Rand McNally. Yasmin is the main designer for OverDryve, Rand McNally’s biggest and upcoming consumer electronic device for the connected car industry. Laura Collins (2013) shared her artwork in the exhibit The Olsen Twins Hiding From The Paparazzi at the THINK1994 Museum in New York City.

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Faculty Spotlight: Jason Schneider

Professor Jason Schneider is the newest tenure-track member of the WRD faculty. Having taught at DePaul as a Visiting Assistant Professor since 2012, he moved into his current position of Assistant Professor in the department during fall quarter. With an MA in applied linguistics and a PhD in rhetoric from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Schneider felt immediately at home in the WRD program. Today, Schneider wears many hats here at DePaul. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in teaching English as a Second Language and coordinates the graduate certificate program in TESOL. Over the summer, he oversaw the creation of WRD 111, a new course for

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Kate Vieira Brings Immigrant Stories to Life

Last Thursday the WRD Department welcomed Kate Vieira, who spoke with students and faculty about her research on “Money and Bodies: How They Matter for Writing.” Vieira has conducted a great deal of research on literacy in immigrant communities and the families left behind. More recently, her focus has been on writing from the body, and how writing can aid physical, mental, and emotional healing. Her argument in her presentation for the DePaul community? That there are more connections between these strands of research than we might think—and that the root of this connection lies in the materiality of writing. Writing is

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Conference on College Composition and Communication

WRD Faculty Share Their Research at CCCC

If you were on the third floor of DePaul’s Schmidt Academic Center during the first week of April, you might have noticed that the hallways were not quite as bustling as usual. From April 6-9, several WRD faculty members traveled to Houston, Texas to attend the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication, or CCCC—the largest academic conference dedicated to writing and the teaching of writing. Curious about the work that WRD professors shared at CCCC? Here’s a peek: Julie Bokser, along with Sarah Brown, Michelle Navarre Cleary, and Kathryn Wozniak, presented on “Identifying and Eliciting Students’ Metacognitive Development” Sarah Read and WRD

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WRD Week is here!

To pep things up a bit as we near the end of the academic year WRD is planning a series of events April 19-21st called WRD Week to celebrate students in the WRD program! Throughout the day on Tuesday, April 19th and Wednesday April 20th at 11am, 12:45pm, and 2:15pm WRD will feature events in the WRD student lounge on the third floor of SAC. Stop by tables set up in the lounge to pick up free SWAG, meet a WRD celebrity, grab some treats, take part in a social media scavenger hunt (for a prize!), and chat with your

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Students from NMS and 510 with their nonprofit partners

MA Students Partner with Local Nonprofits

This post was written by Meaghan Young-Stephens, a graduate assistant to the WRD program who was enrolled in Writing Digital Content. If you’re like me and spend a lot of time on Chicago trains and buses, you’ve probably seen DePaul’s marketing promise, “The city is your campus.” Of the classes I have taken so far, NMS 510 is the one where the slogan rings most true. NMS 510 “Writing Digital Content” (or WRD 525 for those of us in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse program) is structured around a service-learning component that sets it apart. Early in the quarter, each student

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Spring Quarter Visiting Speaker: Kate Vieira

Kate Vieira from the University of Wisconsin-Madison will be our visiting speaker for Spring Quarter.  Her research investigates issues of writing and literacy within the lives of transnational migrants.   Her talk, “Money and Bodies: How They Matter for Writing,” will take place on Wed., May 4 in McGowan South 105 from 5:00-6:00pm, with a pre-lecture reception from 4:30-5:00pm.

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