New program outlined for graduate students
This fall the UWC unveiled its new Dissertation and Thesis Assistance (DATA) program, designed to provide graduate students with the specific writing help they need.
The DATA program has two key components. The first is that it will pair a graduate student working on a thesis or dissertation with a single consultant. This change is intended to ensure continuity among the student’s sessions and maximize productivity.
“As soon as our UWC graduate clients begin work on their thesis or dissertation, they will be asked to complete a form that will match them with a consultant,” says UWC Executive Director Valerie Balester. “The two can then meet to establish a time-line for their sessions.”
The consultant will help the student develop interim writing goals for the project and may even suggest “homework” to complete between sessions.
The other key facet of the program is that graduate students will now be limited to no more than ten 45-minute sessions on their dissertation or thesis. While this limitation is necessary in part to conserve the UWC’s limited resources, it also serves a pedagogical purpose: helping graduate students develop confidence in their own writing abilities at a key juncture.
“Graduate students who have reached the writing stage of their degree program need to be able to look critically at their own writing,” explains Balester. “Many already possess that skill, but the stress of producing this all-important document makes them doubt themselves. We want them to learn to trust their own judgment and not become dependent on us.”
As with any UWC session, consultants can offer help at a variety of levels. They can discuss big-picture concerns such as the overall organization of the piece or the relevance of specific research, as well as sentence-level concerns such as appropriate word choice or basic grammatical and punctuation errors. Consultants can also discuss documentation styles and proper manuscript format. Realistically, however, they can’t read and comment on an entire thesis or dissertation.
Students who feel they need that kind of line-by-line editing of their complete work may want to hire a freelance editor. The UWC maintains a list of individuals who provide this service, but always urges students to discuss the use of a paid editor with their faculty advisor before hiring anyone.
