Opportunities
The Professional Writing and Communication (PWC) program is designed to help you take the next step as a professional, whether that next step is your first job as a professional writer or to advance an already established career. Our program supports your goals in a number of ways:
- Teaching and graduate assistantships, offering partial to full funding for qualified students
- Small, face-to-face classes to encourage collaborative learning
- Courses scheduled after 5 pm with each course meeting once per week for 3-hours
- Professors who share their professional and academic expertise
- Coursework that combines academics with professional practice through internships and client-based projects
- The Augustus Silva Scholarship, awarded biannually ($3,000 per award)
Teaching Fellowships and Graduate Assistantships
Many full-time students also qualify for a teaching fellowship or graduate assistantship with tuition credits and stipends.
- Teaching Fellows teach 3 sections per academic year of Business Communication or Technical Communication, 200-level writing courses for undergraduates. All teaching fellows receive a syllabus and assignments and take a 1-credit course to learn best practices in teaching writing. Teaching Fellows receive full tuition credits as well as a stipend that is paid bi-weekly during the academic year.
- Graduate Assistants work as writers for campus and other nonprofit organizations, developing digital and print content for a variety of audiences and purposes. Graduate Assistants receive partial tuition credit as well as a stipend that is paid bi-weekly during the academic year.
These opportunities are not only a great way to offset the costs associated with going to graduate school, but they also give you experience that you can take to a job, experience such as managing people, explaining concepts to non-expert audiences, developing materials and lesson plans to support objectives and goals, collaborating with others to design a course of action, etc. All of these skills translate well into professional writing positions.
Internships
As part of the program, you will complete an internship that further develops your area of expertise. These examples illustrate the types of internship opportunities our students have found:
- Aubrie interned at tech company, working with a team to develop newsletter articles and user guides. She also helped record live training sessions, assisted in peer reviews for new documentation, and developed materials for events.
- Amber worked for a nonprofit organization, developing and implementing a social media and communications strategy to publicize events and to build a presence within the local community
- Dan developed and wrote content for a blog to share the results from an NSF-funded research project with public audiences
Financial Aid
To learn more about financial aid, please see these pages from the UMass Dartmouth Graduate Studies web pages: