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Abstract
This article aims to help doctoral students in technical communication prepare themselves for the academic job market and for the subsequent process of earning tenure and promotion in increasingly demanding environments. The authors propose that students do four things: (a) learn to spot and articulate research problems; (b) find their vocation—the work to which they feel a personal calling—within technical communication; (c) identify the research methods that best suit their personalities; and (d) articulate a research identity and agenda that they can explain at three different levels of abstraction: describing individual projects, naming the coherent themes that connect these projects, and defining themselves concisely as scholars. All these orienting practices involve students in stepping back, looking for larger patterns in their work and in their professional interests, and finding specific language to represent them.
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Author Biographies
Keith Grant-Davie is an associate professor in the English Department at Utah State University. From 1999 to 2011 he was the department's director of Graduate Studies. With Kelli Cargile Cook he has co-edited Online education: Global questions, local answers (Baywood, 2005) and Online Education 2.0: Evolving, adapting, and reinventing online technical communication (Baywood, 2013). His current scholarly interests are in online education and in the rhetoric of crisis communication, silence, and apology.
Breeanne Matheson is a PhD candidate studying Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Utah State University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of social justice, rhetoric, cross-cultural communication, and community-based research. Her work has been honored at IEEE ProComm and she has presented her research at conferences including ATTW, WRSL, and APA/PCA.
Eric James Stephens is a PhD student in the Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design (RCID) program at Clemson University. In addition to pedagogy, his research interests include issues of social justice, schizoanalysis, popular culture, and big data to better understand power relationships in society. He has presented work at several university symposiums, PCA/ACA South, IWCA, ATTW, and IEEE ProComm.
