news – Richmond Writing

Consultant Makena Gitobu Wins Thomas West Gregory Award

I made these remarks last month during Commencement-weekend festivities on campus. I want to share them here so those who were not present, as well as Makena’s family, can read them. Thank you again, Makena, for your hard work for the Writing Center and your professors!

The Thomas West Gregory Award is named for a faculty member who, for many years, advised students seeking certification to teach English and is presented to the senior whom the English faculty judge to be the best English major preparing to teach.

This year’s winner of the Gregory Award is Makena Gitobu.

I met Makena when she was invited to join our Writing Consultant program in the fall of 2021. She trained with me the following semester then worked in our Center and with faculty directly, assigned to their courses. In that capacity, she did work we would normally associate with a graduate teaching assistant. For example, she wrote commentary on student drafts and held one-on-one writing conferences, a job that is both emotionally demanding and intellectually challenging.

During Makenna’s years at Richmond, she has demonstrated a consistent enthusiasm for this work. Makena wrote in a final project for me how she assisted a struggling peer named Jack. After asking Jack about his essay prompt, “I asked, in the simplest language possible, how he had planned to answer the question that the prompt was asking. This gave me a window into his thinking process, showing how he had decided to tackle the key elements of the prompt. Now that Jack had let me into his initial thinking process, I could address the paper’s macro-level issues with a strong idea of his desired direction.”

This approach embodies a semester of training in a single tutoring session.

Furthermore, I am not alone in recognizing Makena’s many talents. As my colleague Dr. Elizabeth Outka notes, “Makena radiates intelligence and POSE. A dynamic thinker and writer, she has been an essential part of the English Department since she arrived on campus.”

Dr. Kevin Pelletier appreciates our award winner’s interpersonal skills, stating ” Makena is such a gem. Smart, a fabulous writer, so so funny, beloved by all her peers, and as charming as they come. I’m really going to miss her.”

I will too. Her intelligence, as well as empathy for others will shine in a classroom, when Makena stands on the instructor’s side of the desk.

So please join me in congratulating this year’s Gregory Award winner, Makena Gitobu.

Consultant of the Year and Other News

What a fine year it was for our Consultants, both graduating and remaining with us into 2023-24. Here are a few highlights. I’m still getting news, so this update supersedes what I shared in our Spring newsletter.

Consultant of the Year:

Each year faculty nominate a senior for this honor. Dr. Michelle Kahn nominated Janis Parker, who had been nominated once before, as well as receiving kudos from a student she had assisted.

Janis majored in History at Richmond and will be a graduate student and research assistant at Villanova. There she will work on the Last Seen project, an archive of materials from right after the Civil War. Last Seen focuses on recently enslaved people seeking family members from whom they had been separated. You can learn more about the project here.

Consultant Article Accepted for Publication

I encourage students taking Eng. 383, our class that trains Consultants, to submit final reflective essays to WLN’s Tutor’s Column feature. WLN, nearing its 50th anniversary, remains one of the two most influential journals for theory and practice in our field. Several 383 students have sent in articles, but finally we have a forthcoming publication.

Lillian Tzanev’s “A ‘Wise Moron’ Reflects on Academic Writing and Consultancy” explores a sophomore’s attitude toward writing center work before and after taking our class. I will let you know when the piece appears online and in WLN’s print edition.

Lillian will not rest on these laurels; she will soon conduct research in Bulgaria exploring anti-abortion theology in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church..

Other Consultant News

Tanner Brooks will begin his studies at the University of Richmond School of Law. Furthermore, he will be a lead member of the campaign staff for a Virginia State Senate race this summer into early fall.
Susannah Carter will do research with Dr. Rick Mayes about the physician shortage, nurse scarcity, and burnout post-COVID.
Luiza Cocito will be a marketing associate at LinkedIn in New York City.
Molly Earle just accepted an offer with MARKETview here in Richmond, and she will start next month.
Michal Ilouz will be in Richmond this summer to conduct cognitive science research before studying abroad in Melbourne, Australia this Fall.
Jess LaForet and Braden Wixted, as well as Joe Essid and Emily Ball, will be trained in neurodiverse pedagogy by Director of Disabilities Services Dr. Cort Schneider. Jess and Braden will become our first disabilities specialist consultants.
Kaitlyn Garrett will continue her internship with a Richmond area publisher; in October, she will begin an internship as a writer/journalist for Borgen
Brie Grossman will be moving to New York City to work in sales and trading at Barclays.
Allison Ngyuen will be traveling to Europe with family after graduation, before beginning dental school at VCU School of Dentistry in July.
Andrew LaPrade will be joining the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency as a cartographer.
Anna Phillips has received an A&S Summer Research Fellowship to do research at a lab at Tufts University in Boston that studies autism and sexuality/sex education. She is also attending the summer study abroad trip to Perugia, Italy.
Jay Welle will take CPA exams this summer, then move to New York to work in External Audit for PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Recognition for 2022 Consultants Who are Graduating

It’s been a long year, with the waning of the Pandemic and a lingering sense of anxiety among students, staff, and faculty. So with great relief, and gratitude, I want to congratulate our graduating seniors for their hard work.

A few pieces of news stand out in Spring 2022. First, we had two recipients for Consultant of the Year, an annual award for graduates; faculty nominate Writing Consultants for this honor. And the winners are Maya Lieberman and Jon Gandara.

Jon and Maya finish their time at Richmond with signature accomplishments that marry service and peer assistance. Jon not only assisted several classes in different fields of study, but he also found time to proofread drafts of every faculty summary submitted this year by Consultants working in our Center. He and Joe Essid would then discuss any summaries that needed more. Jon’s job helped to prepare him for the painstaking duties he’ll undertake as a law student at the University of Mississippi.

Maya also worked with different courses, long assisting in Professor Outka’s General Education courses in literature. This year, she helped freshman writers in Representing Civil Rights, a first-year seminar taught by Professor Patricia Herrera in our Department of Theatre and Dance. She will begin work with BookBub in the Editorial & Production Co-op, editing and writing content for the company and its community of book lovers.

Maya and Jon will be recognized in our Commencement program. To both students, congratulations and Godspeed.

Other Consultants are bound for exciting jobs and graduate work. In no particular order save how early I received the news…

Ben Weiser has been accepted for the program Master of Public Policy at Oxford University. He is receiving the Jepson scholarship for Oxford, to fund his graduate work.
Erin Derubertis was hired as a Data Engineer at a software company called Tresata in Charlotte, NC. She reports that “my writing skills came in handy even in a data-focused position.”
Olivia Gallmeyer has been accepted into a Master’s of Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies at Brandeis.
Sophia McWilliams will be working for Kobre and Kim, a global law firm in New York City, for the next year or two before attending law school.

Of course it is with sadness that we bid all of our graduates farewell. If you have news about your work after leaving Richmond, please let us know and I’ll crow about it (there’a a final metaphor) here.

Consultant News: Tech Writing at Jefferson Lab

By Julia Siewert, Writing Consultant

Editor’s Note: From time to time we run “dispatches from the field” by current or former Consultants. Here Julia shows us the utility of what we do even in the most technical of settings.

Last summer I worked as a technical writing intern at Jefferson Lab. This job involved working with subject matter experts to edit, create, and format highly technical cryogenic resource and operations manuals. These were operations modeled after JLab’s CHL2 (Central Helium Liquefier), and were being modified (and, in some cases, created from scratch) for use at SLAC for their upcoming LCLS-II project.

I learned a LOT more than I thought I would as a writer, and went by the motto “if I can understand it, so can the engineer” while I was editing. I also got to work a bit with basic graphics and got to make keys for the process and instrumentation designs for LCLS-II. Both of these combined made a comprehensive guide to the machinery and operations of the cryogenics for this awesome project at temperatures around 2-4 Kelvin (which is about -271 to -269 degrees Celsius).

This was an awesome experience, and I’m proud to say I successfully created around 9-10 complete procedural documents that will be implemented in the commissioning process. I especially enjoyed combining my love for writing with my science background and working with some of the nation’s brightest in engineering and physics.

Image (The two sections of linear accelerator in the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at Jefferson Lab) courtesy of Jefferson Lab at Flickr.

New International Blog About Writing Centers

I’m really pleased to announce “Connecting Writing Centers Across Borders,” a new publication by Writing Lab Newsletter. It gives me great pleasure personally and professionally to collaborate with editors Muriel Harris and Alan Benson in working on the first postings for the blog. Some veteran colleagues such as Carl Glover have already posted their ideas.

Our focus, at the blog and a new column in WLN, will be international collaboration. The need is there, as writing-center initiatives are cropping up globally, often taking shape in culturally appropriate ways for their home nations. My own first post focuses on how technology from a center builds ethos and influence on campus.

One shoe cannot fit every foot, and as I learned in 2013 at the Conference for The European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing, best practices vary widely and the US model of peer-tutor work is far from universal.

Using the new blog and column, we directors, tutors, writing consultants, peer mentors, and those doing similar work plan to share resources, stories from our centers, and advice to help our writers and each other.