Since the Graduate Writing Center was launched in Spring 2016, UVM masters and doctoral students have made more than 3,000 individual and group appointments, plus joined in weekly writing retreats and semester-break dissertation camps, to support their success in advanced academic and professional communication. Staffing the Graduate Writing Center are graduate students from across UVM’s programs who are recommended by faculty for their writing skills and who receive College Reading and Learning Association certification in guiding students from diverse backgrounds and disciplines through every stage of a writing project—from initial planning to big-picture revisions, final edits, and presentation.

Nancy Welch, Professor of English and Graduate Writing Center Coordinator, sat down with two recent graduate writing consultants—Ashley Waldron, who earned her Ph.D. in Biology in 2019 and Diana Hackenburg, a doctoral candidate in the Rubenstein School of the Environment and Natural Resources—to learn where they are now and how serving as a graduate writing consultant contributed to their graduate experience and career paths.

Nancy: Tell me about your experiences as a graduate writing consultant—what you did and what you learned.

Ashley: As a consultant I worked with fellow graduate students to provide feedback on writing and discuss writing strategies. I also led workshops for classes and provided support in our writing retreats and dissertation camps. But more than anything this position was about grasping, and then helping others to grasp, that learning to write is a continuous process, not something that if you didn't learn early on, you're out of luck. Writing is not something you’re either good at or bad at, but something you’re constantly working on—even if you’re a professional writer or experienced researcher.

Diana: Academic communication is its own juggernaut, and then there’s so much specificity and difference across fields—and even within fields—depending on the particular journal or audience you’re writing for. So, I was helping students see the rhetorical style and expectations for what they were working on while also emphasizing the need for their voice and their contribution. You’re not just summarizing the literature—previous research—but joining a conversation and highlighting what you’re adding as a scholar, what you’re doing through your research to move the conversation forward.

Ashley: Being a graduate writing consultant gave me a framework for talking about the writing process—things like determining purpose and audience—but also a framework for seeing and working with the whole person, realizing that who students are is more than their dissertation or the single document in front of us.

Diana: Being a PhD student can often feel like a very individual pursuit—with so many different stressors and, especially, feelings of imposter syndrome. But in the Writing Center you meet other students in the same boat, build relationships, and help each other tap into resources you might not have realized were available to you as a graduate student. The Graduate Writing Center really widened my world at UVM beyond my lab.

Ashley: I was part of a very tight lab group, but as a consultant, I met and learned to talk with so many diverse students from across different programs. I don’t think that would have been possible otherwise. Talking with so many different graduate students about their projects also gave me more perspective on my work and more confidence in writing and in talking about what I do.

Nancy: Where are you now?

Diana: I work with Sandia National Laboratories in Sante Fe as a climate program communications specialist. They are creating a new strategy for addressing climate change, and my role is thinking about how we implement that strategy through international and external communications, in ways that also account for the complexity of climate science and how politicized it is in the US.

Ashley: I’m on the scientific support team with Addgene in Boston. It’s a nonprofit biological repository, and our mission is to help promote open, collaborative, reproducible science, especially in biomedical research. I help troubleshoot problems with the biological materials that we’ve distributed to researchers around the world. That means lots of one-on-one communication. Another core part of our mission is providing educational resources, so I help with that side of things too by contributing to the blog that Addgene maintains that’s read namely by people new to biology research.

Nancy: How has your graduate consulting experience contributed to your career path and the work you’re doing today?

Ashley: In my current position, I draw on the mentoring training that we received for the Graduate Writing Center: listen to what your peer colleague is asking; really listen to understand what their actual question or problem is—and what the root of the issue is—instead of jumping to conclusions or speaking over someone. And the Graduate Writing Center helped me develop my own writing skills which help me think about how content is going to be used and interpreted, whether it’s a technical email or a blog post.

Diana: I think my background in science, climate change communication, and graduate writing consulting was a combination that made me stand out to Sandia. They really wanted someone not just to create content but to think strategically about the key messages they want to put out about their work. I had lots of stories I could tell in my interviews with Sandia about working with teams of writers in the Graduate Writing Center and helping writers hone in on what their key messages are: What do you want this paragraph to say? What’s the key message? That experience is coming to bear in the work I do now as part of a communications team.

Ashley: The strategies I used to interact with people in the Writing Center now shapes every interaction I have working with someone trying to access and use our materials. The Graduate Writing Center taught me how to meet others with patience and compassion, and to treat a problem someone is having as a training opportunity.

Diana: The Graduate Writing Center is not just tips and tricks for writing. It’s inspirational. It's helping someone talk through who their audience is and how to show that audience what’s valuable about their research., This is why being a consultant was valuable to my experience as a Ph.D. student and my position in climate change communication strategy now.