Dictionary entrance for the word experience

WRD Internship Opportunities

Are you eager to put your WRD education to use? Perhaps you want some work experience to get you ahead of the crowd while you’re hunting for a job? An internship is a valuable opportunity to practice the skills you develop in the classroom out in the real world, and to strengthen your resume with relevant professional experience. Writing is an integral part of almost every professional field, and as a WRD major, you will have no doubt developed the writing and research skills to work in a wide variety of industries and organizations.

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Faculty Spotlight: Jennifer Finstrom, WRD Adjunct Faculty

This Winter Quarter, Professor Jennifer Finstrom is teaching WRD 371: Mentoring Youth in Community Writing Groups. The course is for students who want to mentor young writers and understand how writing in community functions as an identity-building process.  WRD 371 earns Experiential Learning credit in the Liberal Studies Program and is also an elective in the WRD major and Professional Writing Minor. Students provide extensive online feedback for middle school writers engaged in writing projects and also visits to them at their school.

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WRD 377 Students

WRD 377: Writing & Social Engagement

This Winter Quarter, instructor Jen Finstrom is putting a twist on WRD 377: Writing and Social Engagement. WRD 377 courses always include an experiential learning component—typically, students will complete mandatory service-learning hours by going out of the classroom to serve and collaborate with communities and organizations in Chicago. What makes Finstrom’s course unique is that while it remains grounded in experiential learning and community service, students in this WRD 377 class are primarily collaborating and working with their Chicago community online rather than in person. How? Students in WRD 377 give written online feedback to sixth graders writing poetry at

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Pokemon Go on a Smartphone

WRD Faculty Research: Professor Jason Kalin Studies Urban Space and Rhetoric

Wearable technologies, like smartphones and smartwatches, allow us to use location-based services to “check in,” to establish routes and routines, and to discover nearby activities. But how do these new technologies affect the way we make sense of urban spaces? WRD Professor Jason Kalin and his colleague, Professor Jordan Frith of the University of North Texas, recently explored this question through a collaborative research project. Kalin’s areas of expertise are in rhetorical theory—visual, digital, and material rhetorics—and memory studies. Frith’s research focuses on issues of space, place, and mobility in media. In their article, “Wearing the City: Memory P(a)laces, Smartphones,

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WRD 111: Transition DePaul

WRD 111 is designed specifically for international students and was taught this Autumn Quarter by Margaret Poncin and Douglas Sheldon. The course has two main goals—to introduce students to the city of Chicago and to help students transition into the academic culture of the United States. As a result, WRD 111 instructor Margaret Poncin says, “students visit museums, architectural landmarks, and neighborhoods as part of their research for class assignments.” How is exploring Chicago paired with an introduction to U.S. academic culture? One class project required students to do just that—get out in the city and utilize concepts learned in

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Good Things from Chicago Public Schools, The Worst in Professional Writing, and Obama’s Rhetoric of Education

This week’s roundup of articles collectively considers the question ‘How can we do well in writing, rhetoric, and discourse?’  The New York Times article shares a tutoring success story in Chicago, while Stephen Lurie’s piece in The Atlantic argues that Obama’s vision of education reform has proven to be empty rhetoric thus far.  Each piece asks its readers to consider the efficacy of words, rhetoric, and  discourse.  On a lighter note, we found a list of the worst examples of professional writing in 2013 — read at your own risk!

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Grant Writing Class Aids Nonprofits

Students from the WQ2013 course WRD 560: Grant Writing wrote grant proposals that resulted in three local non-profit organizations receiving $33,500 in awards. WRD 560, taught by Antonio Ceraso, Assistant Professor in WRD and Director of the MA in New Media Studies, focuses on the genre of the grant proposal—both the written documents themselves, and the genre as a particular response to the emergence of broader social forms of giving or contribution. As part of their coursework, students partner with local organizations to apply their grant writing skills and, ideally, to help these organizations to secure grants.

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WRD Students Profit from Nonprofit Event

On September 24, MA in WRD and MA in NMS students received valuable career insights from four communications professionals working in the nonprofit sector. “Profit from the Nonprofit Experience,” the first event in a series of WRD professional development events, brought four Chicago-area nonprofit professionals to DePaul to share their experiences

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