[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to a special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]
I’ve covered the five courses I taught this semester in the first four posts in this series (since I had two sections of First-Year Writing), and so for the final post I wanted to focus on my role as the Chair of our Graduate English Studies programs at FSU (we offer both an MA in Literature and a Creative Writing Certificate). But in so doing, I am also shifting the tone of the series: because while we’ve certainly been facing for many years a serious challenge in terms of enrollments in our Graduate English MA, I’m very very proud to note that we have dramatically reversed that situation; a few years back we were in single digits in the number of students in the program, which had been temporarily frozen as a result, while as of this moment at the end of the Fall 2025 semester we have 25 enrolled students!
Mostly I’m just really excited about that trend and wanted to share it. But in case it might be useful for other folks facing similar situations, I also wanted to share two things that have, I believe, contributed to this significant upswing; the first is a practical thing we’ve done consistently and well, and the second a philosophical shift that I’ve made a permanent part of our program.
The practical thing has been to make and share (not only live, but also and I would argue especially as recordings) a ton of webinars, most of them featuring the voices of our Grad students themselves (mostly current ones, but with some alums sprinkled in as well). These webinars have represented our program and our community far better than I ever could by myself, and have I believe modeled for prospective students what the experience and community are like for our Grad students. Every time we’ve recorded a new one I’ve seen at least one or two new applications for the program over the subsequent weeks, sometimes from folks who were in the live audience for the webinar but most often from folks who saw them down the road (generally linked on our website). I can’t recommend this practice strongly enough.
The philosophical shift is a significant one, but it’s also one I very much stand by. For the first couple years of having the CW Certificate, its courses were pretty much entirely separate from the MA ones, and reserved for students in that Certificate program. But in order to recruit more students for the MA, I decided to allow MA students to take CW courses and have them count as Electives toward the degree. Since we only require 9 such Electives total (along with one required course), this shift means that a number of our students might well take significantly fewer Literature courses; but it also and especially means that they will be able to design their own version of the MA, one that might include Creative Writing if it is of interest, and in any case that can be more individualized (which was always a goal, but I believe this shift makes it much clearer still). I’ve put through a proposal to cement this practice as policy, and believe it will help us continue to recruit and grow our numbers, while also doing what we want to do in these wonderful Graduate English programs.
Special post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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