If you’re interested in joining Sigma Tau Delta, which is the International English Honors Society, registration is about to open. To be eligible graduate students must be actively enrolled in a graduate program, have completed six credits of graduate coursework, and have a minimum 3.3 GPA. Dr. Dana Horton (dhorton1@mercy.edu) is the Sigma Tau coordinator this year and is the one to contact about this, but please let me know as well if you intend to join (cloots@mercy.edu). There is a one-time membership fee, the payment of which you would coordinate with Dr. Horton. A Sigma Tau induction ceremony takes place at the end of each spring semester on the Dobbs Ferry campus. Inductees and any families/friends are invited and encouraged to attend though attendance is not required for membership.
Category Archives: Useful Program Info & Tips
Withdrawing from courses / getting tuition refunded.
Sometimes when nearing a semester you find out that you need to drop a course in which you’re registered, and for which you’ve paid or had aid allocated. It’s important to note that in order to get some or all of your tuition refunded you must officially withdraw from the course. Even if you don’t attend/log into a course after it begins, that isn’t the same as withdrawing and technically you’re still in the course until you officially withdraw. The next thing to note is that the amount that you’ll be refunded depends on when you withdraw. Below is the policy as written in the Graduate Catalog:
- Refunds
When a student officially withdraws from any course or courses by filing a formal withdrawal notice (Drop/Add Form) with the Office of Enrollment Services, refund of tuition will be made according to the below outlined schedule. See the course bulletin for specific refund dates. The date of withdrawal is the date upon which the formal withdrawal notice is received. Withdrawal may be processed at the Office of Enrollment Services or via the Web at Mercy Connect. Fees are non-refundable once courses begin.
Date of Withdrawal / Tuition Refund
Prior to second week of scheduled course meetings /100%
Prior to third week of scheduled course meetings / 80%
Prior to fourth week of scheduled course meetings / 50%
During or after the fourth week of scheduled course meetings / No Refund
Notice that as per those instructions the specific dates for each semester’s refund schedule will be listed in that semester’s bulletin. You can always find full digital versions of the catalog and bulletins here on the Mercy.edu site.
Fall Semester Begins Wed. 9/6. Students taking 599 this fall take note of Comprehensive Exam.
The fall 2017 semester begins on Wednesday 9/6. Even though our online courses run on a weekly unit schedule all students should sign in on the first or second day of the semester to read over the syllabus, get clear on the course policies and schedules, and see what activities your professors require of you that first week. Each professor will run her or his class a bit differently and have different requirements to which you’ll need to adhere.
For your reference you can always find the academic calendars for upcoming semesters published HERE on the Mercy website. MA courses are always “Term A” so refer to the Term A section of the academic calendars.
All students needing to take ENGL 599 this fall should be enrolled in their 599 section at this point. It will appear on your schedule like any other class if you are in fact enrolled in a 599 section. If you plan to take 599 this fall and are not already in a 599 section, contact me right now at cloots@mercy.edu and refer to this post for the procedures for getting into your 599 course. We will get you setup in time for the fall but this needs to get sorted now. Related: all students need to take and pass the program’s Comprehensive Exam before entering 599 and beginning their final semester. So for those taking 599 in the fall, if you have not yet taken and passed the Comp Exam contact me at cloots@mercy.edu now and we’ll get that taken care of.
I will be putting up my annual “welcome to the semester” post here on the blog in several weeks so check back at the start of the semester for that, and for other informational posts that might pop up this and next month.
All About the required 500 Course – When to take it, Waitlists, etc.
Let’s talk about ENGL 500, and when you should/must take it, since this is something that a lot of people have questions about.
Everyone must take 500 because it is designated in our NY State Board of Ed license as our program’s core course.
The course runs each fall semester, and only in the fall. It’s impossible for a student to complete their coursework during just a spring and summer semester so every student will be with us for at least one fall semester (and if you’re only with us for one fall semester, then of course you need to take 500 during that fall semester). If a student is with us for two or more fall semesters, though, that student can take 500 during any of those fall semesters. We recommend taking it later rather than sooner in your progress toward the degree, as 500 can be a weird and difficult course, something that might be overly confusing at the start of graduate studies. But you can take it whichever fall semester you want.
Every student who needs to take 500 during any particular fall running of the course will get into that running of the course. Students who need 500 during, say, fall 2017 are students who plan to graduate at the end of fall 2017, spring 2018, or summer 2018. Students who don’t plan to graduate until the fall 2018 semester or later do not need to take it during this fall 2017 (but may take it this fall).
Students who need 500 during any particular fall but don’t get into the course during open registration will still get in. This happens by getting on the waitlist. After the course fills we watch the waitlist for the next several months. If only several students get on the waitlist, we open the existing section of the course and give seats to those students. If, though, a lot of students get on the waitlist, then we consider opening a second section of the course. If that happens we split all of the students, both those registered and those on the waitlist, evenly across the two sections.
This is why you must get on the waitlist if 500 is full but you need to get into it. If you need to get 500 during a particular fall semester in order to graduate on time, you will get in. The one drawback to not getting a seat in 500 when seats were available during open registration is that you must be patient, as again we need several months to determine whether to open more seats in the existing section or to open a second section.
As always, contact me with any questions at cloots@mercy.edu
How Many Courses Should You Take Each Semester (Full Time? Part Time?)
Registration for spring opens tomorrow so let’s talk about how many courses you should enroll in on any given semester.
The MA program has since its inception considered two classes/semester to be full time, as this is (with some exceptions) an industry standard for MA English. Recently though the College has gotten loud with us about its overarching full-time/part-time policy, which is officially that full time is three courses/semester, and any less is considered part-time. This does not mean you should take three courses per semester if you’ve been taking two courses/semester up to this point.
Absolutely nothing has changed in terms of financial aid, if you’re receiving such loans. The financial aid situation for students taking three courses is and has always been slightly different than for students taking two courses, but nothing about that has changed. All that’s changed is that the College is requiring us in the MA program to now tell our students that if you’re taking two courses/semester, you’re officially part-time in terms of your coding in the College’s system. The thing is, this is how it’s always been; our MA program has just internally used the industry standard of two courses/semester when designating our students as full or part time.
SO, here’s the bottom line. We still recommend that students take two courses per semester, especially if you’re working, have care-taking responsibilities, or have any significant other life-responsibilities you’re balancing out each week with your schooling. Two courses/semester is generally considered the right pace for truly spending the right amount of time each week on each of your courses, in terms of studying (which is different than just reading) your syllabus assignments, hopefully venturing out into other readings beyond the syllabus, and developing your research papers.
Three courses is doable for some; but it is a lot of work, can quickly become overwhelming, and can make earning the degree feel like a chore. I’ve had students accidentally take three courses because their staff advisor told them to, and when I’ve suggested that they back off and take two courses they express relief as well as confusion as to why they were told to take three in the first place (answer: because your staff advisors are following the College guidebook of 3/semester rather than the MA recommendation of 2/semester).
Let me know if you have any questions by emailing me at cloots@mercy.edu. Again, my advice is to keep taking exactly the same amount of courses you’ve been taking each semester, if that amount has worked for you.
Event of Interest in NYC: An Evening with Toni Morrison
Anyone planning to be in the NYC area on October 27 should check out this event in the city hosted by The New School: Dangerous Work, an Evening with Toni Morrison. Morrison is one of America’s and the world’s greatest writers. Tickets are $40 and can be purchased through the linked event site.
Event of Interest in NYC: New York University’s Institute of African American Affairs Presents Wole Soyinka
Dr. Morales has called our attention to a special series taking place next week as part of NYU’s Institute of African American Affairs Scholar-in-Residence program. Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate for Literature 1986, will be involved in three events beginning with a lecture on October 3rd, a film screening on October 4th, and a conversation on October 7th. All three events will be held at NYU’s Tishman Auditorium at Vanderbilt Hall, which is located at 40 Washington Square South in New York City. I know that most of our students are located at a distance from NYC, but some of you are nearby and others of you might want to journey to attend. I encourage you to attend. The events are free and open to the public but you would want to RSVP at (212) 998-4222. Details can be found on their website linked here.
Let’s talk about assessment, and how we assess your final 599 thesis paper.
Some of you in the program are already teachers or are employed in fields of education in other ways. If you are, you probably know that American education has become overrun at every level by the current trend, “assessment.” While the basic idea of assessment, the connotation you probably get from reading that word, is something everyone in education has always done–we do it when we give you a grade for any paper or class–this new type of assessment I’m talking about is something very different, very specific, and very difficult to apply to less-linear studies such as of art, music, philosophy–and literature. This new type of assessment involves a reductionist view of what education actually is–one in which students produce “data” which we can presumably “measure” against a set of “learning outcomes” and by which we can then determine whether or not you are “learning.”
That concept works great in many disciplines (math, physics, etc) but less so in others. I and many of my colleagues teaching in the humanities have a hard time seeing your insights, explications, analyses and expressions of such as “data” which can be measured against some fixed yardstick. Many of us harbor a much more complex and varied notion of what learning actually is, of what is actually taking place over the course of your literary studies (and we believe that these things will be diverse and different for each of you, are not able to be homogenized.) Well no matter what I or any of my like-minded colleagues think about it, this type of rigid assessment is something we have to do now because our accrediting body demands it. As a result, over the past year or two we faculty have had to come up with a program assessment structure, a fixed “yardstick” to use to measure whether or not you, our graduate students, are learning, in the sense that our accreditors define the term.
We’ve tried then to appease that directive while also creating a structure that respects diversity and difference, that respects the irreducible complexity and variety of literature, literary studies, learning; that respects you. First, we devised a set of “student learning outcomes” (or SLOs) which we tried to word in a way that both focus in on the things we want you to accomplish during your MA study, while remaining unfocused enough to allow for a variety of ways that you might address (and we might assess) each outcome. So here’s what we came up with as the five SLOs for the program, meaning the things that we hope you’ll all be able to demonstrate by the time you complete the program:
- Students will demonstrate critical thinking and interpretive skills reflecting knowledge and comprehension of important British literary texts.
- Students will demonstrate critical thinking and interpretive skills reflecting knowledge and comprehension of important American literary text.
- Students will demonstrate critical thinking and interpretive skills reflecting an awareness of theoretical trends and criticism.
- Students will demonstrate knowledge of some of the literary traditions, and/or cultural situations, and /or historical eras from which the literature referenced in SLO1, SLO2, and SLO3 emerged.
- Students will create original research topics, research primary and secondary sources on those topics using digital databases, and produce writings on those topics which demonstrate clear grammatical prose and accurate style.
Then, we had to come up with a way to measure these five SLOs against every student to determine if students are meeting these by the the end of the MA program. We created a rubric which we now use to “assess” papers written in the program’s final course, ENGL 599 Master’s Thesis Tutorial. Mentors and second readers now complete the rubric for each 599 paper at the end of each semester. We file the completed rubrics with a copy of the thesis paper. Eventually our accreditors will come around as they periodically do and when they do we’ll point to the filing cabinet as proof that program assessment is taking place. Students can ask their 599 mentors to show them the completed rubric for their 599 papers. But hopefully your mentor will have made clear whatever strengths and weaknesses your 599 paper showed during the feedback and mentoring process of the 599 tutorial. Nothing you might see on the rubric should be a surprise.
Now because this rubric will be held against every 599 thesis paper, each of you should be aware of what it looks like now, even if you’re in your first semester here. This way you can be aware of the sorts of things we’ll be looking at in the 599 paper and can work on developing these things in your courses leading up to 599. Click here to see the rubric.
Reminder about our tutoring and support services here at Mercy College
As we begin another semester I want to remind everyone of the support structure in place for Mercy students, a structure equally available to those on-campus and those online. Refer to my earlier blog post, linked here, which provides you with a run-down of and contact information for things like our tutoring and writing services, library research help, counseling support, and other things that a graduate student might find helpful. It’s important for you to know that, even if you are a distance-learning student, you are as much a part of the Mercy College student body as anyone on-campus, and have access to the same services and support. Let me know if you have any further questions, -CL
Applying for Degree Conferral
Students entering their final semester should be aware that they must apply for degree conferral in order to receive their degree after completing the program’s degree requirements. The college officially confers degrees at three times during the year: in February (intended for students who completed their requirements in December); in May (intended for students who complete their requirements that spring semester); and in August (intended for students who complete their requirements that summer semester). The application deadline for each of these dates falls well ahead of the conferral date, though.
That means that all students entering their 599 sections this semester should be completing that degree application soon. Should you not apply for degree conferral on time, it just means that your official conferral date would be pushed back to some point after you do actually apply; should you apply and not complete the requirements for the degree that semester, then your conferral is simply paused until a later date. Your advisors in the Student Services offices typically alert relevant students to the need to apply for degree conferral, but you should be aware of this and take ownership of your degree conferral situation. The complete procedures and form can be found here on the Mercy College website.
Program Director's Blog for the Mercy University MA in English Literature Program 