DGS John Bugg Discusses Developments in the Graduate Program

An Interview with Professor John Bugg

By Elizabeth Bolger

Over the past few years, there have been several developments in the graduate department related to admissions, funding, and distribution requirements, just to name a few. So, I sat down with John Bugg, the Director of Graduate Studies, to learn more about these changes and what we can expect to see in the future. 

EB: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. My first question is: what have been some of your goals as Director of Graduate Studies?

JB: Most of what I’ve tried to do as DGS falls under two related categories: standardizing our program and improving our students’ experiences. For the first of these, my goal has been to align our program with current national practices on everything from admissions requirements to dissertation expectations. We had a lot of policies and practices in place that were serving as obstructions for our students – unnecessary hurdles and administrative clutter.

This effort to standardize and streamline our program is necessarily tied to my other goal – of working to give our students a better experience. At the curricular level, we’ve been able to make changes that benefit students, such as relaxing distribution requirements to give students more agency over their coursework, and being more flexible about internal documents like the dissertation prospectus. It’s been more of a challenge, however, when it comes to increasing material resources, since a lot of those decisions (such as stipend rates) are made above the department level.

So what we’ve tried to do is find ways to help students by using what material resources we do have at the department level. For instance, we set up a student lounge with a microwave and refrigerator, and we make faculty offices at both campuses available to dissertators during the summer months. I think that one of the misconceptions about graduate programs is that changes have to be total and radical – in my experience this way of thinking leads to nothing actually getting done. So what we’ve tried to do instead is make a series of incremental changes to improve our program and I hope to improve our students’ experiences.  

EB: You mentioned stipend rates earlier. When did the English department add an additional year of funding for PhD students? Why was adding an additional year of funding important to the department?

JB: About five years ago, we began accepting applications from students who wanted to pursue the PhD directly after the BA (previously we required an MA for admission to our PhD program). This change meant that some of our students – those coming in directly from the BA – would be doing an extra year of coursework. So in fairness to these students, the Graduate School extended the funding package to six years for these students, which is something that is becoming more common nationally, and that better reflects time-to-degree averages.

EB: Right. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more about your time as DGS. What changes/developments to the graduate program have you been most excited about?

JB: We’ve increasingly been able to align our cohort size with our advising capacity. Like many English PhD programs recently, we’ve reduced the size of our incoming cohort – in our case, we now aim for an incoming class of 6 PhD students. This change has helped us to dedicate more advising time to each student at each stage of the program. This is particularly important as students move into the later stages of the program, since we are now able to offer more advising support to dissertators and job seekers.

EB: Are there any changes the department is currently looking to make to the graduate program?

JB: Two areas we’ve been working on lately involve the curriculum and advising. For the curriculum, we’ve just revised our distribution requirements – we had a rather baroque structure of requirements in place in the past. We’re also in the process of revising our foreign language requirement for the PhD, following the national trend of moving from two to one foreign language required. Looking ahead, we’re developing a graduate certificate in Writing and Rhetoric that will be a good option for our MA and PhD students.

In terms of advising, we’ve recently added to the traditional role of the Job Placement Officer what we’re calling the Job Placement Committee. In the past decade the work of advising our graduate students for various job markets has greatly expanded. I say “various job markets” because it’s no longer the norm for students to apply for positions at four-year colleges and universities only. More commonly they also apply for positions at community colleges and high schools, non-teaching positions within academia, and of course jobs in other industries.

This means that most students will have at least three or four job application profiles to develop, with overlapping but tailored materials for each. The structural expansion to our job placement program has meant that while all students are mentored by the JPO as well as by their own dissertation advisors, they are also assisted by the JPC to help them manage the complex demands of various employment markets.

In addition, we’ve recently formed a related sub-committee that focuses on helping our students secure teaching positions at high schools. We have done well in this area – recent alumni are now teaching at Sacred Heart in Greenwich, the Marymount School of New York, and the Jackson Hole Classical Academy, for example. With both of these committees, we now have about 9 or 10 faculty directly involved in job placement.  

EB: There have been a lot of exciting developments in the department and it sounds like we have more to look forward to. Thank you again for speaking with me!