Special Opportunities for Students

Professionalize through Graduate Assistantships and Graduate Teaching Assistantships

Begin professionalizing now and learn about the university beyond the classroom while helping to support your studies. For your first year of study, you can apply to work closely with English faculty as a research or editorial assistant, work as a grader in core literature classes, or gain valuable experience as a tutor in the CASA Writing Center. In your second year, you can apply to teach as a teaching assistant in the First-Year Writing Program and gain valuable mentors and colleagues in your faculty.

See interdisciplinary in action at the annual Graduate Symposium

Each spring, graduate students have the opportunity to present their work at the Interdisciplinary Graduate Symposium. At this event, you’ll present original scholarship and engage with researchers from across the humanities and liberal arts. Symposium attendees present their work in history, art, literature, local scholarship, linguistics, writing, and poetry and interact with nationally-recognized keynote speakers and scholars.

Present your work at professional and scholarly conferences

Join a body of active scholars. Take your work beyond the classroom and out into the larger scholarly community by presenting at regional, national, and even international conferences. Your faculty will encourage you to present at professional disciplinary conferences, and students in our M.A. in English program have presented their work at:

• The Conference of College Composition and Communication
• Conference of College Teachers of English
• South Central Modern Language Association
• American Studies Association of Texas

Gain international honors

You can become a member of our active campus chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society. Sigma Tau Delta offers you opportunities to lead campus events and fundraisers, participate in literacy and language activity in the community, and publish creative and scholarly work.

Become a community-engaged writer

In joining the M.A. program, you become part of a diverse and active community of writers, poets, and scholars in our South Texas community. The English department participates in and sponsors multiple community- and campus-focused events each year, such as the People’s Poetry Festival, University Authors’ Day, the Coastal Bend Writing Project, film events, camps, writing projects, and other annual speaker series.

Further organizations and opportunities:

• Switchgrass Review and Windward Review, publications highlighting Art and Literature in the community
• Islander Creative Writers
• Island Waves, the University student newspaper
• Work in University Marketing and Communications
• English Club
• Coastal Bend Writing Project