On the Application Project
What It Is
As you know, the application project entails choosing a job or graduate program for which to put together application materials (minimally, a cover letter and resume for job; cover letter, resume, personal statement, and writing sample for graduate program), map out an application strategy and get feedback on it in a peer review session, and turn in your application materials along with an explanation of your rhetorical strategies in them. The key part of this assignment is your explanation of your overall strategy for getting from here (ENGL 400, SUNY Fredonia) to there (the job or school you're applying to)--how you researched and decided on a field, how you developed a strategy after gathering information on the assumptions and expectations of gatekeepers in the field, how you framed your application materials and represented yourself and your skills in them, and why you think the rhetorical strategies you used in your application materials will be effective.
What For
The key idea of the assignment is to give you academic credit for something most of you are already doing--or are starting to do--putting together an application for a job or graduate program in which you can see yourself being relatively happy. Or, more precisely, to push you to go beyond mechanically generating a resume and cover letter and toward treating the search process as an intellectual and rhetorical challenge. By thinking critically about your intellectual and rhetorical strategies during the search and application process and writing "metacognitively" on it, you are expected to gain and develop skills that will be useful outside of this course: researching potential fields and organizations of interest to you, figuring out how to represent yourself and your skills most persuasively to the gatekeepers of a particular organization or institution, making the parts of your application work together in a coherent and effective rhetorical strategy, and assessing the strengths and weakness of that strategy and those materials.
A beneficial side effect of doing this is that we can archive your strategy essays on the course web site, so that other Fredonia undergrads and alumni can learn from your efforts on this project. Archiving your essays on the web means that your audience is potentially quite huge (although practically quite small!) and that your essays become public documents rather than simply another assignment in a class. (You will have the option of not including your strategy essay in the archive if you so desire.)
The "Looking Ahead" option of the teaching presentation assignment feeds most directly into this assignment, although the writing you do in the research-based revision and the audience/genre revision may also function as writing samples for some kinds of applications. As with the other assignments, then, this one is aimed to allow you the freedom to make it mesh well with the other kinds of speaking and writing you're doing in the course.
How To
As with the other writing assignments in this course, there are several steps to this project. First is doing enough preliminary soul-searching and researching to be able, by February 25, to email the course listserv with your general plans for the application project--or at least a sense of the preferred possibilities. Then doing enough follow-up research and writing to have a complete draft of the application project (for job application, cover letter and resume; for graduate application, cover letter, resume, personal statement, and writing sample; for both, strategy essay--the key part of the assignment) by April 16 for a required peer review workshop. The "final" version of this assignment is due on April 26.
Assignment Sheet
Due: Friday, April 26, 2002, no later than 5 pm, in my mailbox in the English department main office (277 Fenton) or in the envelope outside my office door (240 Fenton). Your strategy paper should be submitted to me in electronic form as an attachment in "rich text format" (in your word processing program, go to the "file" menu, choose "save as," and then select the ".rtf" option) by this time, as well, so that I can code and upload it easily.
Format: The strategy paper should be double spaced, with reasonable fonts, font sizes, and margins; have a title that indicates main argument of paper; a heading that includes your name, the course name or number, and the date; and, if applicable, a bibliography and citations in MLA style (see links page for explanations of this style of citation), with proper MLA quotation format for quotations within a paragraph--"..." (12)--and for quotations five lines or longer. Along with the strategy paper itself, you must turn any application materials that you think are relevant over and above the required minima (for job application, cover letter and resume; for graduate application, cover letter, resume, personal statement, and writing sample).
Criteria for Evaluation: Your base grade will be determined by your performance on the following criteria: (1) relevance and usefulness of research done: how effective was your research in helping you decide on a field and develop a rhetorical strategy based on the information you gathered on the assumptions and expectations of gatekeepers in the field? (2) coherence and persuasiveness of the reflection on your research process and rhetorical choices: how well did you frame your application materials? explain and assess your rhetorical strategies? (3) quality of application materials: how well did you represent yourself and your skills in them?
ENGL 400: Senior Seminar, Spring 2002
Created: 2/13/02 6:33 pm
Last modified: 4/16/02 5:07 pm