SWLF Graduate Students Attend, Present at National Conferences
By Veronica Suchodolski
As graduate students, important work happens every day in the classroom. But sometimes, important work also happens on a nine-hour van trip to a conference in Spokane, bonding with members of your cohort and with your professors over waterfalls, taco trucks, and sing-a-longs.
During the first week of spring term, a group of professors and graduate students from Oregon State University’s Master’s in Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture program traveled to Washington state for the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) annual convention, which brings together thousands of scholars on writing research, theory, and teaching for four days of panels, workshops, and other sessions.
Image
Graduate students from Oregon State University attend the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Spokane, WA. L-R: Professor Ana Ribero, Vanessa Garcia Vazquez, Yvette Rosales (back), Joselyne Tellez-Cardenas (front), Georgia Wright, James Lindgren, and Casey Dawson.
“It was a very wholesome experience from the get-go,” said second-year master’s student Yvette Rosales of the carpool up to the conference. “To have a real bonding experience with people in my cohort, that was really, really special.”
But the conference wasn’t just interpersonally enriching; it also provided valuable academic and professional opportunities for OSU students to enhance their classroom experience.
Rosales and another second-year student, Joselyne Tellez-Cardenas, had the opportunity to present at the conference. Professor Ana Milena Ribero and Professor Sarah Tinker Perrault also presented.
“I’d never been to a conference a day in my life,” Rosales said. It was her advisor, Perrault, who invited her to apply to be on a panel together, knowing that Rosales’ thesis work had overlap with the topic — “Abundant Opportunities for Improved Equity: Using Critical Lenses in Science Reading and Writing to Support Students in Using and Subverting Disciplinary Norms.”
“It was awesome,” Rosales said of the experience, which came less than two months before her thesis defense. “Everyone was very kind in the crowd. And I got really great questions that made me think differently about my project, which is always very helpful.”
For first-year master’s students in attendance, seeing their peers present was powerful as they prepare to submit their own conference proposals this spring. “It was really wonderful to get to see that,” said James Lindgren. “One, I think they were the only master’s students that any of us saw presenting, so that was cool. But also, we’re in classes with them. To get to see their work and hear about their work before their defense — it was really good to see that.”
Beyond presenting, the conference also allowed students to explore topics related to their own research, network with scholars they’ve read in the classroom, and feel the exciting energy that comes from bringing the often solitary work of academics into a shared space.
“Graduate students benefit greatly from attending academic conferences,” said Ribero. “It’s an opportunity for them to share their work with others and to hear some of the newest research in their field. Additionally, when graduate students get to see and meet other scholars in their field, they can better understand what it is like to have an academic career. Particularly for students from underrepresented communities, seeing senior scholars that look like them can help them to see a place for themselves in the discipline.”
“It felt really awesome to see that there are other people thinking about the same problems that I am,” Rosales echoed.
Image
The view inside the Seattle Convention Center, where OSU students attended AWP in 2023.
AWP
The master’s students in rhetoric, writing, and culture don’t get to have all the fun. Each year, members of Oregon State’s literary community attend the AWP Conference. Hosted by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, the literary conference is the largest of its kind in North America.
Last year, the conference took place in Seattle, giving easy access to OSU’s MFA cohort. Two second-year MFA students in fiction, Selene Ross and Aviva Xue, recall similar experiences of inspiration and expansion to their MA peers, attending panels on a wide range of topics: screenwriting, queer horror, Soviet writers, and publicity, to name a few.
“It gave me an urgency,” reflected Ross. “Living in Corvallis felt really removed from where a lot of literary action was. It gave me more of a sense of what it means to be a writer. It doesn't just mean that you publish a novel that is wildly successful. But instead, there is so much work that goes into writing and publishing and storytelling in general. That felt exciting to me.”
“Motivating and intimidating,” Xue added. “There are so many books in this world. It’s a kind of culture feast.”
Professor Jennifer Richter, who celebrated her new book of poetry, Dear Future, at AWP 2024 in Kansas City, echoed the sentiment of AWP connecting students to the larger literary community. “The AWP conference is a wonderfully heartening and exciting reminder of the wide literary world beyond Moreland — full of passionate editors, gorgeous presses, and eager readers,” she said. “You can hear writers you admire speak about subjects such as creative writing pedagogy, craft and process, and their current projects. Spending time walking through the bookfair is an excellent way to connect face to face with editors.”
For all students, they walked away from their respective conferences with a sense of what’s possible for them as writers, scholars, and teachers.
“I think in grad school, it’s easy to feel like sometimes we’re not going anywhere, like what we’re doing doesn’t matter,” said MA first-year Vanessa Garcia Vazquez. “And then we meet these people that are doing exactly what we want to do and were in our positions. It gives you hope that there’s a finish line somewhere, and what I’m doing is going to matter to someone. The way I was sitting at that conference, idolizing someone doing the work that I’m doing, there’s going to be someone else like that once I get there.”