Translating Your Postdoc Experience into Practice

An academic journey is an interesting thing. After focusing on developing specialized knowledge in a field during your PhD and then digging deeper during your postdoc, it is understandable to wonder how you might use your specific expertise in different settings – whether inside or outside of academia.

A recent panel of Ph.D.s working in industry highlighted the importance of translating your doctoral and postdoc experience into broader terms. Taking an inventory of your skills, capabilities, and strengths can help you gain confidence as you begin to imagine you do have something remarkable to offer to a future employer or to leverage for success in your career.

Skills learned during graduate school and a postdoc fellowship have set you up to be a competitive applicant for most industry and start up jobs, in addition to the traditional academic track. By the completion of your training, you are highly intelligent, with an ability to learn and teach yourself “what you don’t know.” You are adept at gathering all the available information and making a good decision regarding what it means and what’s next. You have developed great analytical and logic-minded skills, which you can apply to move an issue, experiment or conversation forward. All it takes is stepping back, and reframing your experiences for a different audience.

Need some ideas about how your graduate and postdoc experiences have prepared you for a rewarding career inside or outside of academia? Check out this list from Peter Fiske’s keynote at the National Postdoc Association meeting 2017 (#NPA2017) to get you started:

Ability to function in a variety of environments and roles
Teaching skills; conceptualizing, explaining
Counseling, interview skills
Public speaking experience
Ability to support a position/viewpoint with argumentation and logic
Ability to conceive and design complex studies and projects
Ability to implement and manage all phases of complex research projects and to follow them through to completion
Knowledge of the scientific method to organize and test ideas
Ability to organize and analyze data, to understand statistics and to generalize from data
Ability to combine, integrate information from disparate sources
Ability to evaluate critically
Ability to investigate, using many different research methodologies
Ability to problem-solve
Ability to do advocacy work
Ability to acknowledge many differing views of reality
Ability to suspend judgment, to work with ambiguity
Ability to make the best use of informed hunches

As you develop your own inventory, keep in mind that similar skills or capacities may be called different things in different sectors or fields. Do your research when you are targeting a job prospect and develop tailored versions of your CV or resume and cover letters to reflect the field specific terms. You are prepared – it just takes a little translation to help others see it easily. We invite you to budget an hour or so a week to explore the references below for more tools and ideas.

Peter Fiske, 2015 at UC – Berkeley – Put Your PhD to Work: Practical Career Advice for Grad students and Postdocs
Try taking a self-assessment with these quick activities: Dependable Career Strengths Exercises, UW Career & Internship Center
Connect with other events, job listings, and online resources: Beyond Academia: Jobs and Internships, UW Career & Internship Center
Review other people’s lists of skills and see what resonates!
- Identifying Skills, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Career Services at Brandeis University
- PhD Transferable Skills, Career Center at University of Michigan.

When Is It Time to Move On?

A postdoc experience is often a leap of faith. You might make decisions about what’s next for you after your doctoral program based on need, opportunity, ambition, passion, interest, or a combination of these factors. Once you land a postdoc position, you will learn different things about yourself, and certainly you will also learn things about your research group that were not always clear through the interview process.

With this newsletter, we pose the question – when is it time to move on? There are numerous factors to consider, but the main thing to know is: it is healthy to ask this question, regardless of your current experience (whether 6 months or 6 years into your postdoc).

Is It Time to Change Groups?

Are you getting the opportunities for growth and experience that are important for your next career steps? It is not uncommon for a PI to hire a postdoc because of a skillset they bring to the group. This is a good thing; but, if you are simply reproducing skills and experiences from your graduate research, you are not growing. You are just working. A postdoc should be both – work and professional growth.

Are you in a mentoring or work environment where you can flourish? Postdocs have diverse needs when it comes to mentoring and work environments. Learn more about your own needs and seek an environment, a mentor, and a research group that provides the experience you need to become your best.

What about letters of recommendation? If you truly have a difficult relationship with a PI, you will likely be concerned about the kind of letter of recommendation they will provide. This is among the reasons we often advocate for building a mentoring team, or a deeper bench of supervisors and researchers who can speak for you. Develop your own succinct, dispassionate narrative of what happened with a given faculty advisor if the relationship has truly broken down and you feel you cannot trust a letter from them. You can think about core elements that are useful to share, such as: I wasn’t getting enough independence in this particular lab group and I need to grow further; we had differences of opinion regarding best directions for the work; I learned a considerable amount but we never connected and it made it difficult to sustain the working relationship… You can make it a positive story – one that emphasizes what you are seeking more than what you are not getting. Regardless of your feelings, it doesn’t look good to future employers if you talk badly about your former supervisor.

Is it Time to Leave Postdoc-ing Behind Altogether?

Postdoc experiences are great for building your professional network, gaining more skills and experience, and also doing important self-reflection regarding what kind of career is really going to be meaningful for you.

When you’ve garnered enough skills and experience to be competitive, move on! Because of imposter syndrome, some of us may never feel truly ready. Or myths may circulate about what it takes to be competitive in the job market. Do your own research on what your field needs, and get feedback from several people about your track record. Hiring committees are comprised of many people and it can help to get diverse perspectives about your strengths and where your gaps may be.

Or, after more time in an academic research setting, you may now have enough information to know this isn’t the right trajectory for you. Maybe for what you want to do next, you don’t need more advanced research training, but instead need to cultivate other skills or experiences. A variety of self-assessment tools can help you identify where your particular interests and skill sets are pointing you, and you may be surprised by the answers.

Whatever your situation, handling yourself professionally through the transitions will go a long way. Asking yourself – am I in the right place, am I getting what I need – is a lifelong practice that will serve you well in finding the best fit in work environment, supervision, and portfolio. And taking a proactive approach will help assure you get what you need. You never know until you ask! If you need help thinking these issues through, or practicing how a conversation could go with your faculty supervisor, please always feel free to sign up for an office hour or make an appointment with the OPA senior faculty advisors.

Additional Resources:

Writing in Graduate School: Making Sense of Feedback

Core Programs welcomes guest writers to our newsletters – UW students, staff, and faculty. Since it is the time of year where many of you are working hard on your writing, we invited Dr. Karen Rosenberg, UW alum and director of the UW Bothell Writing and Communication Center, to share some guidance with you.

Getting feedback on our writing is a key part of graduate school (and, for many of us, life well beyond). Sometimes that feedback is exactly what we need: it stretches our thinking; it confirms that the path we’re bushwhacking is gorgeous and useful; and it sharpens our tools as we continue the journey. When we get this feedback, we know how to course correct and how to forge our way ahead. Thank your professors and study what works about their feedback – hopefully we can use our intellect and spirit to support others down the line.

Sometimes the feedback on our writing isn’t great, but it isn’t terrible either. It doesn’t rock our world with its insights, but we’ve been muddling along all right for a while now and the feedback serves as a green light to keep going.

But sometimes–whether intentional or not–the feedback hurts. It takes the wind out of our sails. It makes us doubt ourselves. In one form or another, this has happened to many of us who have gone through graduate school (that is, jumped through all of the hoops we have jumped through to be in our current predicament of getting painful feedback on our writing). So we might as well talk about it.

First, remember that we are getting feedback on one piece of writing, not on us as writers (and certainly not as whole, beautiful, complex people). This sounds so utterly obvious, yet it bears a reminder every now and again. We are not our writing.

Second, in the UW Bothell Writing and Communication Center where I work, we repeat the mantra: writing is never done, it’s just due. So once we have tended to the sting of the fraught feedback, we can see if we can scavenge any useful bits from it, bits that enable us to revise our work…literally to see it again.

Before we get there, it helps to tend to the sting. I don’t know what it feels like for you (and often I haven’t known what is has felt like for me, because when I was in graduate school I sought to distance myself from my feelings in a misguided effort to become more ‘academic’). But during my 8 years directing the Writing and Communication Center, I’ve spent time thinking about what helps and hurts in responding to others’ writing. Here are some tips to tend to the sting and then use the feedback to move forward:

Read all of the feedback.
Identify what you’re feeling. Shame? Anger? Despair? Nothing? You don’t have to do anything with these feelings except acknowledge them and, if you can, sit with them. Over time, this can help us receive the feedback in a less personal way.
Step away for a while. Get some distance.
Find your people. Seek out friends, family, and colleagues who can help you get in touch with your voice, your gifts, and your most vital reasons for being in grad school.
Use your resources. Schedule a writing tutor appointment at the Bothell, Tacoma, or Seattle campus. And check out these online writing resources curated by the UWB Writing and Communication Center, UWT Teaching and Learning Center, and UWS Odegaard Writing and Research Center.
Return to the feedback. What’s useful about it? What productive questions does it open up? Make a list of questions to discuss with your professor.
Reject feedback that questions your right to be in academia. For example, Latinx student Tiffany Martinez writes about a professor who circled the word “hence” on her paper with the comment “this is not your word.” She rejects the feedback, describes the sting, and doesn’t let it derail her from academic path.
Talk to your professor and make sure you have a clear sense of your next steps – ones that feels authentic to your voice and your goals for being in graduate school.

Many thanks and gratitude to Dr. Karen Rosenberg for writing this edition of the Core Programs graduate student newsletter.

Professors on Pedestals

Is there a place on campus where I can learn how to address/talk to professors? I have been in the US for about six years now, but I am originally from a culture where one is supposed to show respect to people older than you. I therefore still cannot bring myself to address a professor by name (as my other fellow graduate students do), or write an email to them without putting in multiple “Thank you for your time!” and “Sorry to bother you…”.

When I read my own emails that I send out to professors, it’s cringeworthy, since I’m so deferential. It’s worse when the professors I address are just a couple of years older than me. I want to learn to get over this. My friend recently pointed out that calling someone “Prof. X”, and writing so many Thank Yous and Sorrys in email skews the power dynamic a bit too much, and that I should treat professors as colleagues if I want them to treat me as one.

How do I learn this? I hang out with a lot of American friends but somehow this is something I’m unable to learn. —Anonymous

Hi, there. In order to address your question, I reached out to several campus partners. I hope their multiple perspectives and experiences are helpful.

Ziyan Bai is a graduate student assistant with the Graduate School’s Core Programs and Office of Postdoctoral Affairs:

“In Winter 2016, I organized a workshop on “Communicating with Faculty” for international grad students. At the workshop, a panel of 3 faculty members and 4 advanced international graduate students from social science, science, engineering, and humanities shared commination tips and strategies including communicating in person or via email. We have a summary of notes from the panel.

I also got this question many times during my 1-on-1 mentoring with new international grad students. This is not an uncommon situation. The bottom line: find a middle ground that students find comfortable with the degree of reverence they show in the email or talking in person. Usually international students find it uncomfortable if they try to “get rid of” their home culture in order to fit in. There is no universal standard in communication, so staying connected with home culture and being open to learn new culture at the same time is recommended.”

>>Note: Workshop will be offered again in Winter 2017. Details will be announced in the Graduate School Digest and on the Graduate School’s events calendar.<<

Era Schrepfer is the executive director of the Foundation for International Understanding Through Students (FIUTS), which offers a wealth of support and programs for international students at UW:

“We hear this question pretty frequently. I usually suggest visiting the professor during office hours and being totally honest about this with them directly. Just say, ‘I’m from XXX and in my country we are taught from an early age to treat teachers much more formally, so the culture in the classroom here is hard for me to get used to. I want to be successful in your class and for you to feel comfortable. What do you suggest to help me with this?’

Usually, they really don’t mind being treated more formally by international students, but it helps to start off the quarter with a conversation. Sometimes, it’s easier to feel comfortable with a professor when you know them a little bit on a personal level, and it’s meaningful to the professor as well. So ask them questions about themselves. Have they ever been to your country? How long have they been teaching? Where did they go to school? It’s helpful to find some common ground with them and see them as people just like you.

Power distance is one of the most challenging cultural elements! I know a lot of alumni who still struggle with it many years after coming to the US!”

Elloise Kim is the president of the Graduate and Professional Student Senate, and an international student herself:

“As someone who is from a similar culture, I totally understand why you are hesitant to freely communicate with people like faculty members. In my home culture, a respectful manner for people who are older or hold a higher position is obligatory. Yet, if people here can interpret your attitude not necessarily as carefulness but as cultural clumsiness, you may want to question for whom you insist to keep such manners.

I’d like to suggest to learn American cultural manners in the way you have learned English. In other words, think of it as a foreign language. Its syntax and phonetics would be very different from those of your original language. But, you have to learn and practice it in the way the language is spoken by native speakers. You do not become a totally different person while speaking English – rather, you are speaking another language still being yourself. Likewise, ways of communication need to be learned and adjusted. You can be very polite in a different way!”

Katie Malcolm is an instructional consultant for the Center for Teaching and Learning and specializes in working with international, multilingual and first-generation college teachers and students:

“This is a great question, and one that many grad students have. The resource ‘Communication Strategies for International Graduate Students‘ has some specific strategies for students about communicating with advisors.”

>>If you’d like the full manual, you can request a free copy. <<

Ask the Grad School Guru is an advice column for all y’all graduate and professional students. Real questions from real students, answered by real people. If the guru doesn’t know the answer, the guru will seek out experts all across campus to address the issue. (Please note: The guru is not a medical doctor, therapist, lawyer or academic advisor, and all advice offered here is for informational purposes only.) Submit a question for the column →

Making UW Your Own – #UWGradSuccess

Recently, two graduate students from Chemistry, Sarah Vorpahl and Nick Montoni, organized and led a day-long gathering focused on Strengthening STEM through Diversity. The meeting brought together leaders from UW student organizations, as well as faculty, staff, and community partners to collectively discuss issues of equity in STEM and to develop concrete strategies that will promote a climate of inclusivity for multiple underrepresented communities studying, researching, and working in STEM disciplines.

Core Programs attended and gathered several pearls of wisdom from the plenary speaker UW bioengineering faculty Wendy Thomas, and from the student leadership panel, with representatives from Women in Chemical Sciences, oSTEM, SACNAS, AISES, and the student union UAW 4121. We will be sharing highlights and insights, and working on larger institutional guidance, over the next several weeks as the ideas and opportunities identified at the event will contribute to a larger learning environment where all students can thrive at UW. Here is just a start:

Imposter syndrome. “Imposter syndrome” is familiar to many in Graduate School (and beyond): that feeling that you aren’t smart enough or that you might not have what it takes to succeed. Here’s the thing, you are not alone! Surrounded by smart people, many of us may feel we don’t fit in. Some advice has been to “fake it til you make it.” We agree and yet this should not be confused with “suck it up and deal.” That is, if there are things within your grad program or research group that seem odd to you – ask questions, talk to a peer or trusted colleague to check out your observations, seek allies to support you and who can also speak up and ask for changes. Asking for what you need to thrive is a big part of making your graduate experience your own and one in which you can shine. Shifting our academic culture and landscape to a place that encourages human connection and growth will take all of us–from interpersonal changes to institutional, structural level changes.

Develop a growth vs. fixed mindset. Fixed mindset is the belief that “some people just have what it takes,” while others will never have what it takes. It is the thinking that some individuals are automatically good at understanding concepts and theories in their discipline, writing, acquiring research funding, public speaking, and so forth. This is simply not true. Being a graduate student is about developing and honing your skills, knowledge-base, and competencies over time. It is a process. In this regard, we encourage you to shift towards a growth mindset. If you are experiencing a roadblock in graduate school, it is more than likely that a peer or faculty has experienced a similar challenge. If you are part of the 1-in-3 graduate students who are coping with issues related to mental health, utilize campus resources like the DRS. DRS staff can help you draft an accommodation plan that is personal, confidential, and can set you up for success. Graduate school is a marathon, not a sprint, so pace yourself and give yourself permission to grow.

Find a mentor. There are numerous reasons why you seek out mentors in graduate school. An advisor can give you research direction, but a mentor really invests in you. National guidelines are now pointing to building a mentor team for academic direction, career guidance, and personal support. Mentors can make the difference between surviving and thriving – seek them out and invest time to build your team. As keynote speaker Dr. Thomas shared, when she finally had a mentor who was equally excited to talk to her about her research results, as well her feelings about the research, she knew she could stay in academia.

We thank the student event organizers, student organizations, and the UW programs that signed on as co-sponsors, for their dedication and hard work in investing in making UW a better place for all of us! Keep it coming. #Together #DiversifySTEM #UWGradSuccess

Best Regards,

Kelly, Jaye, and Ziyan
Core Programs Team

Getting the Mentoring You Need

Throughout your training, but especially in the postdoc experience, your faculty supervisor plays a significant role with you and your future. We know there is a full spectrum of what faculty have to offer and how this matches with what you need. From what we have learned, it can take “managing up” and being proactive in your relationship with your faculty advisor to make it work for you. The National Postdoc Association recently posted a blog with exceptional tips for how to get more from the mentoring opportunities you have. In addition to these points, which we summarize below, we also always recommend developing a mentoring team so you can get a full spectrum of support from many and are not solely dependent on one person alone.

With a few additions from us, here are the top recommendations from the National Postdoc Association blog. See the full blog – available to all UW postdocs through our institutional membership with NPA – for even more tips:

Make time to meet regularly with your mentor(s). In many cases, you will need to request and initiate these. Be prepared for your meetings, send a written summary of progress in advance, and focus your f2f meeting on particular questions or challenges you are confronting currently. Have specific goals and tasks in mind. Send a follow up email of agreed upon next steps or decisions that get made during the meeting.
Be willing to listen and learn. Ask directly for feedback – what is currently going well, and what could be done differently to work more productively or effectively together. Not everyone is skilled at giving feedback, so asking for specific areas where you want to know how you can improve shows strength and the willingness to grow.
Be proactive about your needs. Being proactive is much more than just taking the initiative – it’s about using your time during your postdoc experience more effectively. Thinking about what the faculty needs can also help you respect their interests while asserting yours.
Be a problem solver. When bringing problems to your mentor, you should have possible solutions in mind to foster the development of your own problem-solving skills. While the mentor can provide ideas and feedback, sometimes no one knows your situation better than you.

As the NPA writer concludes: “No matter what kind of a mentor you have – one who offers little or no help; one who constantly overwhelms you with information; or even a mentor who is an experienced teacher and understands how to work effectively with a postdoc – you will get more out of mentoring if you are proactive in the process.”

Additional Mentoring Resources:

Graduate School – Mentoring Resources
Core Programs – 10 Strategies for “Managing Up”
Re-Thinking Mentoring: How to Build Communities of Inclusion, Support & Accountability
NPA – Mentoring Plans for Postdoctoral Scholars
Cathee Johnson Phillips – Presentation on Mentoring Plans for Postdoctoral Associates

Originally posted on August 18, 2016.

Bad Teacher

Hello,

Older graduate student who has had a career already so have a little life experience. I took a class with a teacher who was incredibly condescending both to the undergraduates and the graduate students — I pushed back a bit on this but got nowhere. Unorganized, due dates and test dates were “fluid” (as in they kept changing) and homework did not get graded in time for tests. We did learn a lot about this person’s history and background though… I feel like I owe future students some sort of action or at least a heads-up. — What can I do?

Yikes, sounds horrible. I appreciate that you gave nothing away about the class or instructor. I trust that you filled out the class evaluation. This is probably the easiest yet most impactful thing you can do. Future students can look up class ratings in the Course Evaluation Catalog. And in addition to the instructor, department coordinators and administrators also see the evaluations.

You can also try a online rating site like Rate My Professor. Just be aware of the many biases of sites like this. I would also try taking your concerns to the GPA/GPC of your department. It’s important to create a written record of some type.

I reached out to the Office of Educational Assessment, which replied, “Students do have other places to turn; which is most effective probably depends on the type and severity of the unprofessionalism. Speaking with the department chair can get a note in the faculty personnel file, while talking with the UW Ombudsperson can address more significant breaches. The Ombud is also a great starting point to learn about other appropriate avenues of appeal.”

Hope that helps. Good luck!

Mentoring 2.0: Finding and Working with Faculty Mentors

Throughout the year, we offered you strategies to get the mentoring you need to thrive in graduate and professional school—and we will continue to do so. We have suggested that building a mentor team of peers, faculty, departmental staff, friends, work colleagues and community members can help you recognize and meet your needs and goals as a whole person—not just as a student. We know that “finding a mentor” and “building a team” isn’t as simple as it sounds. It is actually pretty common to hit some bumps on the road as you identify and build working relationships with mentors on your team. We hope the following tips will help you address those concerns:

Difficulty finding a mentor. Depending on your degree program, you may or may not have been assigned a faculty advisor or future mentor (there is a difference between an advisor and mentor). Maybe you’re a little introverted and shy about approaching faculty. Or maybe you just don’t know where to start. Try out these strategies: (1) Ask peers about faculty mentors whom they work with and why. Ask them about the qualities they seek in mentors, and see if their responses resonate with your needs. (2) Re-visit faculty web profiles—including those outside of your degree program—and identify shared fields of interest. (3) After completing steps one and two, make a list of the faculty you’d like to work with, and send them an email to set up a meeting. This guide has helpful tips for setting up that first meeting. Bringing your first draft of an individual development plan (IDP) to this meeting can help you and your new mentor visualize—and plan for—the goals and experiences you’d like to have at the UW and beyond. The conversation may just be an informative 30 minutes to guide you along your path, or it may lead to a longer term working relationship.

Committed to mentoring, but unavailable. You’ve identified a faculty mentor who is excited about working with you. You’ve had a few meetings where you’ve built momentum and plans of action to get things done. You both get along great! Then suddenly it’s gotten difficult for you to meet your mentor for a range of reasons. They’re about to go on research sabbatical, added more projects to their plate, planning for retirement, experiencing life stressors that you are not privy to, etc. You’ve unintentionally fallen off their radar; it isn’t about you, but it’s still frustrating. What should you do? Get back on their radar by setting up a check-in meeting. If your mentor isn’t responding to your e-mails for whatever reason, figure out an alternative method for communication. Leave your cell number with departmental staff and request that your mentor contact you. When your mentor responds, just calmly note that it has been sometime since you connected. You can ask directly if anything has changed to impact the work you are doing together. You may find that you’ll both need to re-visit your mentor/mentee agreement, the frequency of your meetings, or that you’ll need a new mentor depending on the circumstances. The circumstances could be temporary, and sometimes just resetting a communication plan, or using different communication tools, can help.

Not the mentor you expected. There are numerous reasons why a mentor isn’t a fit for you. These can include personality differences, conflicts that are unresolvable, or the feedback they are providing no longer supports your intellectual and professional growth. At this point, it’s critical that you reflect on a plan to change advisors so you can continue your work towards your graduate or professional degree. The first thing we suggest (if you haven’t already) is to seek advice from a trusted peer, faculty member, or department staff to help you think through ways to move forward. The point is to keep yourself from feeling and being isolated as you navigate the process. Second, check out these recommended suggestions for changing mentors or advisors from the UW Graduate School.

Additional Resources

It is also good to be upfront and clear about both of your expectations throughout the mentor-mentee relationship. Take a look these check-lists on expectations for mentors and mentees from the Doctoral program in the UW Department of Physics.

How to Obtain the Mentoring You Need: A Guide for Graduate Students, UW Graduate School
10 Strategies for “Managing Up” (with Your Advisors), UW Core Programs
Managing Your Advisor, Inside Higher Ed
How to Deal With Conflict (For Mentees and Mentors), Inside Higher Ed

Hours and Hours of Office Hours

I am a TA for a graduate level class this quarter, and my professor is asking me to hold 4 hours of Office Hours. I feel this is too much. I had TA’d the same class last quarter, and I had five hours of Office Hours, way more than any other grad class in my department. It was incredibly stressful, and I grew to hate the work because of the long hours. I was hoping that this quarter I can have office hours similar what others in my department hold. How do I tell my professor? I want a good recommendation letter from him eventually and don’t want to piss him off, but there simply doesn’t seem to be an indirect way to tell him what I want to say. —Anonymous

This is exactly the type of situation to take to the Office of the Ombud. They specialize in handling conflicts with others at UW and will help you approach your professor with your concerns. Additionally, you can consult the Center for Teaching and Learning for tips on how to manage office hours and handle the stress that comes with teaching.

Gratuitous to Grade Grammar?

I’m a TA for a graduate-level course, and many of the students are not native English speakers. I am grading assignments with significant grammatical errors: incorrect tenses, wrong plurals, missing articles, etc. I’m struggling with the tension between not unfairly penalizing students, since English isn’t their first language, but also holding them to a high standard for academic writing, given that they are getting a graduate degree. How have other TAs or instructors handled this? —Grammar Nerd

(This week’s answer is courtesy of Katie Malcolm, Instructional Consultant, Center for Teaching and Learning.)

Thank you for asking—this is a question we hear often in the Center for Teaching and Learning. Although we recommend that TAs check with their supervisors to see if their departments have specific policies about this, the TAs we have worked with over the years and our own teaching experiences have given us some helpful perspectives. When thinking about how to fairly assess my own international and multilingual students’ writing, I ask myself two questions: 1) What are my goals for the assignment? What do I need to prioritize? and 2) How can I communicate these goals to my students in ways that will help them succeed?

1. First, I think about what is important to prioritize for my students in each assignment, given my realistic learning outcomes for a 10-week course. What is the primary goal I want students to achieve through each writing assignment?

In my own assignments, my first priority is for students to develop and sustain a logical argument in conversation with relevant research. If students’ errors leave me unable to understand their argument, I can’t assess it meaningfully, and—whether English is their first, second, or fifth language—I will ask them to edit and revise the assignment in order to receive credit.

Because my primary goal is not for students to write as though English were their first language, if incorrect verb tenses or missing articles do not detract from my ability to understand a student’s point, I tend to overlook or “read through” them, or point out a couple of occurrences in the margins and then make a note of these patterns in my end comments. (Showing students the patterns of their errors helps them learn how to avoid these kinds of errors in the future). Just as students need time and practice to develop fluency in their pronunciation and speaking, they also need time to develop fluency in academic, discipline-specific English writing.

2. Once I have articulated my expectations for students’ writing, I clearly communicate these expectations to students in several ways:

At the same time that I introduce an assignment, I share the assignment grading criteria, usually in the form of a rubric. When writing style is an important aspect of the assignment (as it often is), I make sure that it is part of the grading criteria and weighted appropriately.

I assign multiple drafts so that students know that I do not want them to start a paper the night before it’s due (often a major culprit of unedited papers). I’ll ask students to bring an early draft to class for peer review, or to bring a draft to my office hours, and/or to visit the Odegaard Writing and Resource Center (OWRC) to get feedback on their writing early in the process.
I share writing resources with my students, including information about OWRC, which has drop-in hours for graduate student writers in the Allen Library. There are also a number of great online resources on proofreading that may be helpful to students, such as the Purdue OWL’s “Finding common errors” page and their pages dedicated to multilingual writers. UNC also has some helpful editing resources.

Again, thanks for asking this great question — if you would like to talk more about this or other aspects of your teaching, please don’t hesitate to contact us at thectl@uw.edu.