About

The Communications Hub at USC Viterbi's Engineering in Society Program (EiS) is a co-curricular tutoring resource for engineering Ph.D. students. At the Hub, we understand that communication - particularly at the graduate level - is a complex and recursive process in which writers and speakers evolve over time.  We hope that the Hub will be a place where students can find responsive support for short and long-term communication tasks at any stage of their graduate school careers. 

EiS faculty at the Hub provide Ph.D. students with individualized tutoring for their academic and professional communication-based needs including:

• writing journal and conference articles, dissertations, proposals and fellowship applications, career documents, collaborative/multidisciplinary efforts, and industry-related communications 

• speaking in conference presentations, dissertation defenses, qualifying exam presentations, job talks, interviews, poster presentations, and small group presentations

Features of the Hub, including hands-on involvement of teaching faculty, support for graduate-level communication tasks, and sustained interaction with Ph.D. writers working on extensive and long-form communication tasks at various stages, make it a distinct instructional resource. 

As scholars and prospective members of the professoriate, Ph.D. students count communications as necessary to their everyday work and their career prospects, and the Hub is a vital part of a comprehensive and long-term instructional system for building these graduate-level communication skills throughout a graduate course of study. The literature supports the idea that graduate students carrying out advanced disciplinary research and writing have needs that go far beyond the simple application of general rules. Graduate level writing–dissertations, journal papers, etc.--- involves creating original research questions and making original claims that involve a level of knowledge transformation that diverges from the standard pedagogical approaches of writing centers for undergraduate writers and requires a specialized resource.

References

Fife, E.  Making the Case for Technical Communication Courses in Ph.D. Engineering Curricula.  Presented at ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.  June, 2019. Tampa, FL. https://peer.asee.org/33079

Hixson, C., Lee, W., Hunter, D., Paretti, M., Matsovich, H.,  and McCord, R. (2016). “Understanding the Structural and Attitudinal Elements That Sustain a Graduate Student Writing Group in an Engineering Department.” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship 40 (5–6): 18–25. 

Lawrence, S. & Zawacki, T. M. (2019). Re/Writing the Center: Approaches to Supporting Graduate Students in the Writing Center. Utah State University Press.

Okuda, T. & Anderson, T. (2018). Second Language Graduate Students’ Experiences at the Writing Center: A Language Socialization Perspective. TESOL Quarterly, 52(2), 391–413. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.406