by Lindsey Ives

Introduction

Graduate students live in a long-term liminal state between apprentice and professional. We attend professional conferences and meetings to get feedback on our scholarly work, learn more about our various fields, and network with seasoned veterans as well as rookies like ourselves. But since most disciplinary conferences are not geared specifically toward graduate students, it is easy for us to feel like outsiders or lost in the shuffle. The Writing Program Administrators Graduate Student Organization (WPA-GO) seeks to amend such feelings by creating a support network for graduate students aspiring to be (and, in many cases, already working as) writing program administrators.

In this interview, WPA-GO Co-Founders Cristyn Elder and Megan Schoen describe the process they undertook to build a nationwide graduate organization, while current Co-Chairs Laurie Pinkert and Brian Hendrickson discuss future directions for WPA-GO. Their story is relevant not only to aspiring writing program administrators, but it is also relevant to graduate students in any discipline seeking to foster a nationwide community of colleagues.

Participants

IP: In Progress
CE: Cristyn Elder
MS: Megan Schoen
LP: Laurie Pinkert
BH: Brian Hendrickson

IP: What is WPA-GO’s mission? 

CE: I’ll read it as it’s written on our bookmarks and in the bylaws. Then I’ll explain how it came about. “WPA-GO seeks to strengthen connections between graduate students and professional WPAs through social networking and educational development opportunities. In support of graduate student WPA preparation, WPA-GO works with faculty WPAs to provide the following: mentoring activities, workshops, scholarships and awards, social events.” That’s still pretty accurate.

IP: What inspired that? 

CE: Basically the story is this: in preparation for the WPA Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 2010, Eli Goldblatt, from Temple University, sent out an email to faculty WPAs around the US, asking them to identify graduate students who might help him with graduate student events, and getting graduate students more involved in the conference. There were seven of us initially: Megan, Tim Dougherty, Ryan Witt, Meaghan Brewer, Ryan Skinnell, and Steven Lessner. Megan and I were at Purdue, Ryan Skinnell was at Arizona State University, Ryan Witt and Meaghan Brewer were at Temple. Tim Dougherty was also at Temple at the time. Steven Lessner is at Michigan State University.

IP: And you were all recommended to Eli from your various faculty?

CE: Right.

MS: He purposefully contacted faculty throughout the country to get graduate students from all over the place.

CE: Right. So all we did for Philadelphia was organize a meet and greet or pizza party. And actually Laurie was there. It was after Philadelphia that we asked Laurie to become involved.

LP: One thing to know about the pizza, the social event, is that it was run a lot like a special interest group. There was a lot of listening and asking for input from a number of graduate students, and I would say there were probably 25-30 graduate students at that event. But at that point it was seen as a conference event.

CE: So that was our mission. Our mission at that time was to plan some sort of social gathering. I think part of deciding this mission for WPA-GO was a result of what happened before Eli invited graduate students to help in Philadelphia, and I also think this might be one of the aspects. . . I don’t want to speak for Eli but it would be interesting to find out why he decided to reach out to graduate students for the conference in Philadelphia because I think before Philadelphia was Minneapolis, and before Minneapolis was Denver. And Denver was the first time Megan and I and some other Purdue graduate students went to WPA.

MS: 2008.

CE: We were presenting on the WPA board game that we had made in Shirley Rose’s WPA class, and Eli came to our playing session. So it would be interesting to know if that had any influence on him when he was planning the conference two years later. But what’s important to know about Denver is this: when we went to present on the game that we had made, we had two sessions. We had one session where we read papers, which turned into a journal article, and we had a second session where we opened it up to everyone to play the game. And what we were disappointed by was: A) we were basically the only graduate students there, so we were presenting to people who weren’t our target audience; and B) there weren’t many sessions, at least for me at that time, early in my graduate career, that were relevant. So at that moment in Denver, we did feel this need to know where our colleagues were. And we knew we were privileged being at Purdue because we had a WPA program. So we were also thinking, “how do we get people here who don’t have that kind of support at their institutions?” And I think that’s how this original mission statement came about because I think those are the things we recognized might get graduate students to the conference.

IP: Were you thinking of yourselves as an organization at this point?

MS & CE: No.

MS: Eli just really wanted to have some events, or an event, at the conference that would be attractive to graduate students in order to bring in more graduate students and make those graduate students who were already coming feel like there was something specifically for them.

CE: Then, correct me if I’m wrong Megan, but Megan and I had a conversation about how cool it was that Eli got the graduate students involved and that we wanted this to continue. But even in Philadelphia we started asking people how the organization might serve these graduate students. So it was in planning that social event for Philadelphia that I think we started to have that conversation, and then we passed out those cards that Linda Adler-Kassner had printed up, “New Directions,” and we had asked everybody to write down ways that they thought WPA-GO might help them or serve them.

LP: And at that point it didn’t have a name yet, right?
CE: We didn’t have a name, and this was of course July, so we planned on meeting and talking about it next at Cs [the Conference on College Composition and Communication] in Louisville. Those who were present included Megan, Tim Dougherty, Ryan Witt, Ryan Skinnell, and me.

MS: But it was during that conference that we pitched the idea to the CWPA (Council of Writing Program Administrators) Executive Board (EB).

CE: That’s what happened. So we had planned on meeting Tim and Ryan and Ryan in Louisville to talk about this organization and to tell them what happened at the EB meeting. So the CWPA Executive Board met at Cs in Louisville. Invited by the board, Megan and I went to present our proposal and bookmarks.

MS: We were scared to death.

CE: Yeah, we were scared to death. We were trembling in the hallway.

MS: Going in front of these people who at that point we didn’t know very well. They seemed like these rock stars.

LP: Had they invited your proposal?

MS: I believe we had been for a while in email conversations with Eli and with Linda Adler-Kassner, who of course was the president at the time, and so we had already been throwing this idea of, what if this were a standing committee rather than an ad hoc committee for this one particular conference, but rather something that could plan social events for future conferences. And then we started brainstorming over email. What other things could we do and offer for graduate students? So they knew that this was coming, and through these email conversations it came up that, “Why don’t you come talk to us about it at the Executive Board meeting?”

CE: So I think it’s really important to emphasize that Eli was instrumental. That he changed the tide. Just his reaching out created this. And it was under Linda’s leadership that this all got funded and went through.

IP: How exactly does funding work? It seems like you do have some pretty good funding for scholarships, so where does that come from?
MS: Prior to every executive meeting, all of the Co-Chairs create a report. So Duane [Roen, current CWPA president] sends out a template report to all of the committees. So what we would do as Co-Chairs was put it together, and then whoever was the executive board representative would send it to Duane.

CE: We would get feedback from the rest of the group.

MS: Right. So the process is we would draft it, we’d send it out to the rest of the committee, make additions, corrections, and send it to Duane. The template itself did not include a budget, but we would always create a budget, attach it, and send it to Duane.

CE: Which then set the model for the other CWPA committees.

MS: And now it’s standard that all committees have to do it. So that’s one way that we get funding. The other way that we also get funding is through sponsorship from publishers.

CE: They’re very interested in sponsoring graduate students.

MS: So last year Bedford St. Martin’s contributed $2000 toward the travel grants, for instance. We were able to give $1000 away [for travel to the CCCC’s conference] and held onto the other $1000 for [travel to the] WPA [conference] last summer.

CE: And so that WPA-GO isn’t competing with CWPA for sponsorship and funding, any money that WPA-GO receives has to be approved by CWPA, or they at least know about it.

MS: One thing that you brought up, or that we had a conversation about, is that we got that funding from Bedford/ St. Martin’s, but we didn’t get any additional funding this time around. So one of the things that we all talked about was ways that external funding can be more sustainable or more constant and consistent.

LP: One of the early things that it seems like you guys were modeling was not to overstep our boundaries as a graduate organization.

MS: Right.

LP: So I know under Megan’s EB term [as executive board representative for WPA-GO] she did not contact the publishers to see if they wanted to sponsor us. It was not contact that we made; it was contact that they made with Kelly Kinney, the CWPA representative. However, this caused shifts in the way that our budget was distributed from last year to this year: last year, 70% of our budget was funded by external sponsors and 30% by CWPA, and then the next year it was the reverse, since we wanted to run the same programs but hadn’t followed up with publishers because we didn’t know if that was in our purview. Suddenly, more of the burden was falling on CWPA, which led to this conversation Megan and I had. So I explained that to the executive board in our budget proposal and said, “We’d like to know what our parameters are.” And they were very open and said, “We think it’s perfectly reasonable for you guys to follow up, but we would like it to go through Kelly Kinney who’s already working with publishers and also let her know what events you’re running, what other kinds of initiatives you’re sponsoring. That way publishers know what they can sponsor.”

MS: Because sometimes the publishers have, for instance, volunteered to pay for things like social events because they knew about that. And probably some of the funding that they said, “Oh we’ll give that to the social event,” could have been better used for other things because it was more funding than we really needed for that particular thing.

LP: But because it was sponsored, we’ve always used it for whatever [the sponsor] said it was for.

BH: One of the things that we’re discussing now is providing, along with a mapping out of the year’s events, a packet that could easily be passed along to interested sponsors so that they could really consider in advance, “What are the things we want to invest in?”

CE: And that would make it easier for WPA-GO to plan events because you know ahead of time, as opposed to what has happened in the past where, there’s a conference coming, and we’re waiting to find out how much money we’re going to get.

IP: Okay, so basically your funding goes to social events and funding people to go to conferences? Is there anything else?
CE: We’ve gotten sponsorship from Utah State University Press through Michelle Eodice for printing the newsletter, so that doesn’t cost anything.

MS: Promotional materials, so bookmarks, poster, WPA-GO glasses, etc.

LP: And the Executive Board just approved a little bit of funding for our Graduate Committee meetings as well, so graduate students who are arriving early at conferences to attend these meetings can at least get some refreshment during the meeting. So it has primarily been designated in those ways: travel, the various events – so committee meetings, social events, and then our materials.

IP: What is your membership structure? What’s your model of governance? You don’t have a president, right? And then going along with that, who are members? How do you recruit them?

CE: Let me just answer that first question about not having a president. The reason we don’t have a president is because our president is Duane Roen. Our president is the president of CWPA.

MS: Because we’re a subsidiary of CWPA.

CE: So we’re more a committee rather than . . . even though we’re called WPA-GO, there’s that O on the end because we are a little bit more structured and complicated, multifaceted than the other subcommittees under CWPA; but because we are led by that Executive Board, we don’t have our own presidents.

IP: Who are the officers within WPA-GO? What’s the organization structure? Is it just the Chairs?
MS: It sort of evolved this way. We were the Co-Chairs.

CE: Because we had the initial conversation, and then we asked Ryan and Ryan and Tim if they thought this was a good idea, and of course they said yes and wanted to be involved. And I also think it was easier at the initial beginning stages of an organization to have two people at the same institution.

MS: So two Co-Chairs, and then one of those Co-Chairs serves for a year on the Executive Board. And so the two Co-Chairs are part of the Graduate Committee that steers the organization. That committee consists of a total of seven members that includes the two Co-Chairs.

IP: Do the other members have titles, or what are their roles exactly?

CE: Each representative on the Graduate Committee, according to our new bylaws, should, or is responsible for chairing a subcommittee. I’ll give you an example: so Megan and I were the Co-Chairs. I was on the EB the first year, and Megan was on the EB the second year. Laurie was our Chair for events. She was the Events Coordinator. Patti Poblete was, or is, the Outreach Coordinator. Ryan Witt and Katie Trauth Taylor have been serving as the Chairs of the Professional Development Committee, and they have been working really closely with Tim Dougherty who is not only on the Graduate Committee but the Mentoring Project.

IP: So they’re the ones who put on the events like, “how to write a cover letter,” at the WPA conference?

LP: It’s a combination. . . because, in some ways, on those events the Co-Chairs have some input on what they want to emphasize, but then that committee oversees them. So this year, that committee implemented reviews of sessions so that we could distribute information to a larger audience, like people who couldn’t be at the conference. They also implemented some feedback forms so that people could give feedback after the sessions and we can know how useful the sessions were or whether people wanted different kinds of sessions for the upcoming year.

CE: What was really significant was when we established the bylaws. Because before that, Megan and I were doing a lot, only because we didn’t feel like we could delegate responsibilities or tasks because we didn’t know what people needed to do. We were sort of responding to things as they came up.

MS: We were responding to things when it was almost too late to ask someone else to do it.

CE: So for example with the workshops, the WPA-GO sponsored stuff this year, I had already talked to Kelly Ritter and Duane Roen and Joe Janangelo to set those up. But then I kind of handed it over to Ryan and Katie once we had those bylaws established.

LP: And I think that’s an important thing about organically developing graduate student organizations. In some ways, things were already in process, and then we developed the bylaws that then structured them a little bit differently, and that helped us to say, “This is too much for one person.” And I think for us, when we wrote those bylaws, in some way they were projective, like, “This is what we think is going to happen,” but in a lot of ways they were descriptive of what was already happening and maybe slightly modifying like, “Okay we have people doing event stuff so we probably want an Events Committee. We have people doing these things and so we need that kind of committee.”

CE: And we did model the structure of our bylaws on CWPA’s bylaws. And CWPA has a constitution and bylaws. We thought at first that’s what we would have but again, because we’re pretty much governed by CWPA’s constitution, we just created bylaws for our committee. But I also want to say that now, with those bylaws, I think Laurie is doing a really great job of getting more people involved. I think a really a huge difference between this year and last year is that there are many more people involved. And I think that’s going to be key to sustaining the organization.

LP: That might be a good place to interject new goals and future directions, which is one of the things you wanted us to talk about. I think in the initial stages you have to have workhorses who are going to get the work done, and that’s how the GC operated. They were the ones who were going to get the work done. And I think we’re in a really exciting place now where we can think about the long-term sustainability of the organization and how we want to develop organizational procedures and participation. So one of the things we’re aiming for is that on each of our committees, yes the chair will be a GC member, but then the rest of that committee should be other members of the organization writ large.

MS: To get as many people involved in things as possible, which is how CWPA works.

LP: We’re hoping to get people who are committed to the organization, so people who are still going to want to do the work of the organization on those subcommittees. Because I think we’re at a point where we have to make some choices. Either we don’t pick up new initiatives or we pick up the initiatives as we have those subcommittees that are willing to do the work. I think that’s a realistic expectation. If your membership isn’t willing to get involved in doing the work, then I don’t think that the committee can balance all of the initiatives on their own.

BH: So how do you communicate those expectations effectively, as well as communicate the benefits of taking on that kind of work? I think that’s going to be the goal.

IP: What are the benefits of membership? 

CE: I actually just gave a presentation on this here (at the 2012 WPA Conference in Albuquerque). My presentation, as part of a panel, was, “what are the promises, perils, and best practices of service as a graduate student?” And just to highlight them. I mean the number one promise is the relationships you build with people. I met you guys through WPA-GO. I met Chuck Paine through CWPA. I would say that’s the number one benefit: the relationships that you build with people.

MS: And that’s true not only socially but also professionally because in our field, which is stressful, as we all know, it’s nice to have professional support as well as people who you can say, “Hey tell me about this new initiative you’re doing. What kinds of problems have you faced?” And sharing ideas and leaning on each other, I think it’s really nice to have that support structure.

LP: Other benefits that I think we will be able to continue to offer the members involved are elements of our professional development series and our mentoring focused sessions because we need people who are willing to offer those things.

CE: So what the benefit of that is in terms of the Graduate Committee is that you’re doing important work.

BH: You’re doing meaningful advocacy work.

CE: Right, you’re doing something that’s important and satisfying. And you’re contributing to your field in some way.

IP: What are the perils then? 

CE: Well, balance. I mean I had to put off my dissertation defense for two weeks because I was doing too much other stuff. Two weeks is no big deal, but for other people that could be a year.

MS: And I’m quite certain that I would have finished my dissertation sooner had it not been for, not only this, but the other service projects as well. And that is something to consider. So the fact that we now have an elections process so that people who think they want to get involved can understand what that means to get involved. And that way we can really distribute this work, delegate this work among a lot of people. It’s going to be really helpful for mitigating those perils in a lot of ways. And this is not only a practical issue, but as WPAs it’s also an ethical issue because we’ve just said that our mission is to help graduate students. So it would be a terrible irony if this was a backbreaking burden to be involved in it, and it’s causing people to not finish their dissertations and things like that. So we really need to be careful ethically about how this plays out for the people involved and things are in place now so that those perils can be mitigated.

CE: And this panel that we were on, the common thread through each of the presentations was, “how do you maintain balance?” Service, as a graduate student and as a faculty member, can really bring that life balance out of balance.

IP: Right. Once you start participating, opportunities keep presenting themselves, which is good but also can be difficult.

LP: One of the things we’ve been thinking about too is combining the kinds of opportunities we might provide for graduate students with the things that are going to help them develop scholarly interests. I’ve had some discussions with some of the advisors from CompPile about providing graduate students with opportunities to develop entries for CompPile, so it’s something that in some ways is service to CompPile but is also helping them to become more familiar with certain journals and contribute to a larger body of scholarship.

BH: I think that’s particularly important in an organization that is really established to value the intellectual work that has been sometimes marginalized under that term “service.” That’s something that I’ve thought a lot about on the local level, that if something is going to be sustainable, it has to move into increasing the real intellectual value of that work and not just volunteering for stuff. It can’t just always be another line on your CV under “service.”

CE: Yes, making that work intellectual is important.

IP: So you mean theorizing it and putting it out in publication?

CE: Yes, sharing what you do with the field.

IP: Is there anything else you want us to know about where WPA-GO is going?

LP: I think we mentioned sustainable practices and structures, increasing participation and involvement of the membership itself. I think we’re also still trying to continue to assess the needs of our constituents and the way that those needs are changing. That’s an ongoing one too. So, for instance, the larger CWPA has a Diversity Taskforce, and we’re thinking about whether we might need that as well.

MS: One thing that I think WPA-GO might want to consider going forward is developing a more structured timeline for when everything happens.

LP: We have already started doing that, which is something that I talked with you guys about. Because that’s something I’ve seen with the CWPA archives— I don’t know if this is still existent or if this is what the committees work from— but there was a document that laid out what the different members of the executive board were doing at different times. And that’s something that we’ve been thinking about because not only will it help with people taking over those committees to know what they’re doing but also will help us plan for these things so we can share the responsibility.

MS: And when you’re a busy graduate student, it’s really easy to wake up one morning and go, “Oh crap, I need to do this today if we’re going to be able to get the travel grants.”

BH: Going back to inclusion, if you can get that word out well in advance because you know it’s coming, then people will know what’s available to them.

LP: So that’s the kind of thing we’re talking about when we say we want to develop sustainable organizational practices: we want to have that annual calendar of what gets done and when it gets done.

IP: In Progress aims to reach an audience of graduate students across disciplines. Is there any advice you would have for someone maybe in another discipline who would want to start a similar organization to this? Is there anything you would want them to know? 

CE: I guess the first suggestion would be: try to formulate as clearly as possible what you want your purpose to be, why you would form an organization. I would start there.

BH: What need are you filling?

CE: I think also what was really important, going back to the promises, in any of the service, if you can find people that you like, that you have good relationships with, that you would want to maybe spend a little bit of time with anyway, because you’re going to be spending a lot of time with them.

MS: And that you trust will get things done.

CE: I think I made a mistake earlier, or I thought it was a mistake but it turned out to be okay. I started identifying people I thought, “Oh they would be good for WPA-GO,” and then just asking them to participate, but there was nothing they had to do in order to get in. There was no initial investment on their part.

LP: I think in some ways that helped to involve people who otherwise may not have been willing to come forward, but in other ways, I think that the level of investment was slow to appear because they may not have been invested initially in the way that they needed to be. I think that also meant there weren’t things that could hit the ground running because there weren’t people who were initiating, “Hey let’s do X.” They were waiting for you to tell them since you had tapped them.

BH: One of the things you said earlier that I thought was a really good point was that those structures do have to evolve organically. So that’s just sometimes the way it works, and you have to be patient with it.

MS: Going back to the same question about what people forming similar organizations should know, I think once you’re getting started you have all these great ideas and you want to get them all going. But even if you have lots of great ideas you don’t have to implement them all right away. Make sure you have enough people to take on these roles before you get things rolling. Don’t be too over-eager because you might burn yourself out.

CE: I think that would be good advice too for, not even within just one organization or one project that you’re working on, but in terms of, if you’ve already got three projects going on, perhaps focus on those three projects before taking on an additional one.

BH: Or learn to let stuff go.

MS & CE: Yes!

LP: I think one other thing I would mention for graduate students thinking about a similar organization is that in our position as graduate students to think about our faculty mentors, our faculty sponsors, and our faculty supporters and to talk to them about how whatever institution we might be affiliated with operates and works, and how we might best fit in to that. In some cases it will be a university, and you’re trying to develop a graduate organization within that university. In my experience with other organizations, we’ve gone to our faculty sponsor and said, “We’re interested in doing X.” And he said “That’s a great idea, and I like it, and there’s just no way because of Y and Z. It’s not going to happen.” And so you know not to waste your time on X but rather to move your energy to A.

BH: And cherish that opportunity because it’s one of those rewards. The reward of learning how these institutional structures or organizational structures or whatever kind of hierarchical structures work, and all the hidden mechanisms in there that you would have no idea of otherwise. Cherish the proximity to that and your knowledge of that because I think it’s going to help out in the future.

MS: And don’t spend any money that you don’t have budgeted.