While undergraduate coursework offers opportunities to improve writing skills far and wide, job seeking may not be as simple as writing your way in. Professional development comes in all shapes in sizes, some initiatives stretch networking while others introduce professional skills. This post will highlight a few professional development opportunities specifically for undergrads.
As an ex-undergrad myself, I understand how mystical the WRD Working World can seem to an undergraduate student. Fear not, these professional development opportunities offer a taste of publishing, presenting and networking to help demystify the processes of resume building, job seeking, and with job working.
Publish Your Work
No matter your professional goals, you are a writer. Writers and students tend to be people wanting to publish as much as possible. For Creative Writers, Write City Magazine has rolling submission, so you can submit your work to them for publication any time, free of cost. The structure of your story will need to conform to the magazine’s specific guidelines, such as beginning your story “in the middle of the action” and developing a protagonist “with a goal” and “setting that is described without slowing the pace of the story”. Nothing too abstract here, people. Save it for your screenplay.
On the professional side of the coin is JUMP: Journal for Undergraduate Multimedia Projects. They are open for submissions, accepting multimedia projects composed by undergraduates within undergraduate college courses. The Journal is dedicated to “providing an outlet for the excellent digital/multimedia projects occurring in undergraduate courses around the globe, and to providing a pedagogical resource for teachers working with (or wanting to work with) ‘new media’.” As a publication dedicated to rhetorical scholarship of undergraduates, being selected for publication in JUMP serves as a strong indicator of success in your area of study.
Present at a Conference
For those of us interested in teaching and pedagogy studies are called to submit proposals for presentation at the 2021 American Educational Studies Association (AESA) Conference taking place in November 2021 in Portland, OR. The organization wrote “This Call for Proposals is written with the intent to use storytelling to re-center, reclaim, agitate, inspire, and ignite the purpose, significance, and importance of the foundations of education.” Some critical questions the submitted work should consider include:
“What can we learn from critical engagement, community activism, and justice work that lends itself to reimagining hope through educational liberation?”
“What stories will we tell about educational revolution in search of hope and an antiracist democratic system?”
For more information regarding submission guidelines and the 2021 focus of the conference see AESA “Call for Papers”, linked here:
Propose and Fund Your Research
The Summer Undergraduate Research Grant (SURG) at DePaul is an opportunity for undergraduates to work on their own research project, guided by a mentor. All student proposals require a faculty sponsor, essentially a faculty member to say “I like their research idea and would be willing to mentor them through their research this summer.” The annual application cycle opens on March 15th and closes on April 16th, and award notifications are normally sent out May 1. Proposing, conducting, and funding your own research as an undergraduate is a strong indicator of graduate school readiness and, with the potential for a first author paper, professional academic readiness as well.