Master of Arts in American Studies - Virtual Information Session

Hello everyone, Thank you so much for joining us.

We're going to give everybody a moment to get logged in and settled and make sure everyone can hear, and then we'll go ahead and get started. If you are watching this pre recorded, go ahead and Fast forward just a couple of seconds. And if you're joining us live, uh, go ahead and make sure your sound is working and we'll start in just a second.

Alright, great. Looks like we're good. So hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Jen Radwanski, and I'm the Associate Director for Graduate Admissions here at Stockton University. And I am joined by my colleague, Doctor John O'Hara, who is the program Chair for the Master of Arts in American Studies program here at Stockton. And today we want to tell you just a little bit more about how you could become a part of this program.

Umm, so number one, I just want to share with you, we are recording this session and so.

Umm, if you were watching it live, there is a chat feature available and you can drop any questions you have into that chat feature. We are going to answer questions towards the end of our session today. And I would encourage you that any information you put in the chat, you don't put any personal information as we are recording this and we'll be sharing it with others later. Umm, and then for those of you who are watching this prerecorded, we will also share our contact information with you so that you can reach out to us with any questions that you have. So without further ado, I'm going to turn.

Things over to you, Doctor O'Hara. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks so much, Jen, and thank you to everybody who's here. I don't have a video feed of you, so I can't see you, but you could see me. Uh, and I wanted to, uh, uh, tell you up front that I have to be in the classroom in like 25 minutes. So this is going to be pretty rapid fire and I know you're going to have questions and we'll do our best to get to those. Uh, but if we run out of time, Jen's going to record questions that come into the chat, she's going to give them to me and if.

I can if I can get your contact.

Information I will.

Reply to you via e-mail on questions that go unanswered. Uh, but today I'm here to talk about the graduate program in American Studies. Again, I'm the chair, I'm John O'Hara and uh, I'm going to introduce you to the only graduate program in the School of Arts and Humanities at Stockton. Umm, and we also have a partnership with two programs in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Uh, that is sociology.

Anthropology and political science.

So this is, you know, our program is a really neat.

Fairly small, you know, always hovering around 20 students or so, but a really great way for students in the arts and humanities or the social sciences to find a way to further professionalize in the area where you focus. So we have our student population comes from all of those majors, sociants, political science, Africana studies, literature, philosophy.

History.

And I hope I'm not forgetting one, but, you know, the basically the range of programs that we see in arts and humanities. So some people wonder like, what is American studies? And so that's the first question I want to address. You know, it's a professional discourse and academic community. You can major in American Studies as an undergraduate at about 500 colleges and universities in the US. About another 100 offer masters degrees and P HDS in American Studies.

And what is it really? It's kind of the convergence of a number of fields, as I was saying.

History, literature, political science for to what end for scholars to get together toward a deeper understanding of American history, society, culture and politics and how all those things kind of interact. So where if you're a literature major, you can or, or a literature PhD, you might be able to focus solely in the area of, you know, creative writing and literature.

With American studies, you might be looking at the politics of literature, the economics of literature.

Um, various, like different ways of kind of thinking about the place of creative expression in the formation and formulation of a, of our culture. So it's a whole academic group. I, you know, I would say there's, you know, probably, I'm going to guess 5000 members of the American Studies Association. You can see their logo up there. It's about 75 years old. And there are a number of journals and magazines and other places where the discourse community kind of gets.

Together, to theorize American life, American culture, politics, and history, I went to a number of web pages at various universities that offer American studies as a major, and I took their descriptions of the major and I put it into a word cloud generator, and this is what came out. So if you can just take a look at those words for a second, you can see those terms that are most closely associated with our field.

And so obviously American culture comes out of the largest and around that history, sociology, anthropology, literature, interdisciplinarity.

You know, I, I think it's a magical thing for American studies to be the home to so many people with so many diverse backgrounds in.

Academics so.

I think the premise of American studies really is that quotation that you see there like the the the the assumption is that there is no single approach or methodology or perspective that's adequate to fully survey and explain the expansive elements of American life, society and culture so by.

Practicing and promoting interdisciplinarity. You know that that is the thing about American studies. It's really a crossroads, a place where people meet.

Our faculty at Stockton come from all of these programs who teach in American Studies and who mentor our graduate students.

And these are just some of the questions we ask. And you know, I, if I had time, I would read them out and maybe delve into each one, you know, but fundamentally American Studies is concerned to understand America, it's past, its present, and the relationship between those two things.

Our faculty come from all over the university. This is just a number of book covers of our faculty. Of course, it's a graduate faculty, so I would argue some of our best and brightest faculty members are.

Uh, contributors to the American Studies program, and you can see that full faculty list if you go to our web page on the Stockton website.

So very collaborative, very interdisciplinary. And we also have partners on campus that we work closely with, one of which is the South Jersey Culture and History Center. It's kind of another aspect of American Studies is a, is a, at least one pocket of American Studies is concerned with sort of regional history and regional identity. And so the Culture and History Center run by our own doctor, Tom Kinsella, is in located in our library officially.

But we're connected via that center to dozens of historical preservation organizations in the area, dozens of arts and arts organizations and museums and heritage sites and things like that. And we're expanding all the time, um, through them we've done historical exhibitions. You can see me down there with a little bit shorter hair working with a couple graduate students on a history exhibition that we.

Rolled out in the African American Heritage Museum of South Jersey.

Umm, so.

We also partner with the Archives and Special Collections department in our library, which is obviously concerned with preserving and curating materials preserved from the past and what they might mean from for the present.

Partnered also with the Stockton Art Gallery, you can see one of our graduate students standing at the lectern on the bottom right. She did a year long internship in the art gallery and organized and hosted and wrote the promotional materials and the exhibition catalog text for a major exhibition at our art gallery last year on Indigenous expression and life in the US.

One thing I would always emphasize is that our students get real opportunities to work.

In real professional contexts, I put this slide together just to show us some of those activities. In the top left, you see a book published by one of our recent graduates stemming from her work in the archives, where she digitized and preserved.

Literally hundreds of pictures of Stockton that had been kind of unsorted in a box and and not digitized. So that kind of material will eventually deteriorate or fall apart and fall out of memory.

If we don't preserve them. So she spent, you know, a full semester digitizing, cataloging and writing the text for Stockton's Galloway campus. I think her subtitle was.

Stockton, then and now, and she kind of traced the campus development over a number of years, working with a partner who was also a graduate student in American studies who did graphic design. Umm, she had been an art major.

The primary author, Jen, uh, she was an anthropology major, but she teamed up with a graphic design art major and they put together a book, uh, building Stockton's Galloway campus. Umm, at bottom left, you can see one of our graduate students, Lillian Nickens, umm, appearing at a national conference for black studies, uh, with another faculty member on her left, our right, uh, Donnie Allison from Africana Studies.

A published book by Summerhill. 7A graduate.

One of our students worked with an archive of mid century American ***********. Sounds a little out of the way, but it's certainly in the purview of American cultural studies and history, and she was looking particularly at correspondence erotica. That would have been the ways in which people would write pen would form pen pal relationships with.

Uh.

Models, I don't know what to call them, but the trade was in, you know, photography snapshots.

You know, pornographic snapshots, you know, but you can see her subtitle there was 1955 to only fans and she was kind of drawing connections between the past and the present and how, you know, this particular and peculiar form of cultural interaction occurred. We had a student who recently gave a paper at the 1st Annual Bruce Springsteen Archives in at Monmouth University.

We have performers, we have people who've done internships in various libraries, archives, and museums, including the Surf Museum and the Lesbian Herstory Archives and so on. So, you know, what we really try to promote is that students find, under the mentorship of faculty, find their way into the professional domains where the production of knowledge in American history, culture, and politics occurs.

So it's really, you know, my emphasis as chair has always been on the professionalization of our students.

And I'll get to some of our successful students in a in a couple minutes. I'm very proud of our alumni record.

Through American Studies too, we also administer the Paul Lyons Memorial Lecture Series. Doctor Lyons was one of the founders of our American Studies program back in 2008 or something and passed away in an untimely death, and we memorialize his legacy here at Stockton via a lecture series that occurs each spring where our focus is to bring.

Nationally and internationally prominent voices and scholars to Stockton to address our graduate students.

And indeed, the whole student body. So I don't know if you recognize any people here, but you know, these people are all, you know, what I would call movers and shakers in the academic world, including their bottom left. Lonnie Bunch, who is was the founding director of the National Museum for African American History and is now the director of the entire Smithsonian.

Complex.

So, you know, I think you're probably interested in like, what can you do?

With American studies, and really I would say the horizons are limitless. It's what you bring to the program.

In conjunction with what you learn in the program.

To get you to where you want to be. And I just grabbed four of our recent graduates. Eric Anglero, who's now the LGBTQ Center director at Penn, Christina Nobles in journalism. She's the project director of the Stories of Atlantic City Project.

Jesse Kraft, an associate curator at the American Numismatics Society, That just means coins and money. Uh, that was his interest here. He did a thesis on that topic and I recently saw him on CNN talking about the.

Origin of the $2.00 bill.

Uh, Sophia Lopresti, bottom right there. She came to us from political science and earned her master's degree in American studies and became the head of briefing, uh, for Governor Phil Murphy. So I'm always pleased to see her standing in the background, uh, during Governor Murphy's press conferences.

Again, I'm really proud of our alumni success. We have teachers at high schools. We have teachers at community colleges. We have graduates who teach here at Stockton and work at Stockton, including one.

Executive assistant in El Wing. Excuse me, K Wing.

We have another executive assistant to the president at Rowan who's a graduate from here. We have people working. We have we have a principal at a local high school.

We have a, someone who works at the Federal Reserve Bank in Washington, DC, who recently did a, an exhibition for their lobby on the history of money in the, in America. So again, I think, uh, you know, we, we tend to attract advanced students and we want to push them to, uh, another level of advancement.

What is our curriculum like? Well, it's a 30 credit program. Every course is 3 credits, and so that's 10 courses. In American Studies, there are two foundational courses that everybody is required to take, comprising 6 credits of our 30, and then the other 24 credits are electives.

In a variety of topics.

We also offer independent studies, internship opportunities, study tours, and an option to do a thesis project at the end. So generally for students who come into our program as first year master students, it's a two year program at 30 credits. This is not a complete list of our courses, but I'm just kind of showing a sampling of the kind of courses we offer. Those highlights actually mean nothing. I just couldn't erase them from a document.

I think at one time they were the courses we were off air offering in a single semester.

So.

Just a little sampling of the kinds of courses you might encounter. Always very we try to keep them kind of broad and and use them as a platform for students to shape the kinds of projects they want to do.

We have independent studies. They can take the place of a single semester elective in which you collaborate with a faculty member, define a project, define what you want out of the project. We get it approved by the Dean and the chair or by me in the chair, or excuse me, me, the chair and the Dean. And then we work independently, you know, often meeting once a week or once every two weeks.

To discuss and chart progress.

Uh, internships. We've placed students in numerous kinds of internships, ranging from the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia to AmeriCorps in New York City, to the Surf Museum in Tuckerton to Batstow Village, to our own University special Collections and Archives and the Art Gallery. Uh, lots of opportunities for students to do.

On the ground practice in various areas, either provided by us.

Through internal opportunities.

Special Collections Archives, South Jersey Culture and History Center, Art gallery or external partners whom we already know or students can find their own internships and bring them back to us and will create an agreement with that partner and and facilitate the internship.

Umm, those are just some of the, uh, recent internships that some of which I just mentioned.

We're internationalizing our program to some extent. In the past few years. We have study tours that go to various places around the world, including not so long ago Ghana. We had a faculty LED civil rights tour that was going to be take the buses along the the Freedom Trail of the, you know, the pathways traveled by the Freedom Riders in the early 1960s.

Students have joined with Holocaust and genocide graduate students to go to Poland and Germany.

We have an agreement with Aristotle University in Greece, where we trade scholars up to now, but we're looking, we brought a few of their students here, but we're looking to send some of our students there too, to northern Greece.

Whew, I told you this was going to go fast. Umm, our curriculum, uh, this was. This is just a slide to show students where on the Graduate Admissions web page you can find information related to theses and independent studies. Umm, I would just advise you to go to the Graduate Admissions website if you're interested in learning more about theses, independent studies, and internships.

UMM, Typically our courses are offered from 6:00 to 9:00 PM on Monday through Thursday nights.

But that's not exclusively true. Sometimes we offer them in the daytime, sometimes we offer them online and synchronously. And we have had one asynchronous course in the past year, although that's not our general practice.

Umm, increasingly our courses have been hybrid, which means sometimes in person 6:00 to 9:00 PM here on campus, and sometimes synchronously online, uh, 6:00 to 9:00 PM.

We're changing that all the time based on student needs and faculty availability.

We do have graduate assistantships. It's a form of financial aid. We have deadlines at the end of October for spring semesters and at the end of March for the following fall semesters, in which students can receive up to 3 credits in tuition remission in order for YEAH in exchange for a certain number of hours. Working with a faculty partner on various things could be a research project.

It could be program operations, or whatever the needs of the faculty are.

Some of our resources, we have a tutor dedicated to graduate students in the Tutoring Center, our university archivist who also operates the Special Collections department, Heather Perez, our own Jen Radwanski, you met this morning just a few minutes ago along with the team in Graduate studies and then our Arts and Humanities staff, our new Dean of Graduate Studies, Doctor Hall.

And we have opportunities to participate in Graduate Student Council.

And Student Senate as well.

Some students, we have a dual degree program for Stockton undergraduates that gets a little complex and I won't have time to fully explain it today, but suffice to say you can take credits at you can apply credits taken during your senior year toward the master's degree, leading to an additional year of study that leads into the master's degree. So basically it's a five year.

Master A5 year combined bachelor's and master's program.

Jen, I see you popped back in.

Are you?

Yes, and I would, umm, you know, in addition to this is kind of the perfect transition. In addition to the dual degree, we also have a new, it's not new, but a, a newly, umm, named higher flyer program that if you're not, uh, eligible for a dual degree, meaning that, you know, you've missed that opportunity to start them in your senior year, but you're already in your senior year. You can take uh, graduate level courses that will count both for your undergrad and graduate coursework in your last semester. Umm, and we would encourage you to talk to your preceptor about that too.

So John, I know you need to get to your next engagement. We thank you so much for your time. I will take on the next part of the presentation from here and going over admission criteria and forward any questions to you that come along. But thank you so much and I will share with our audience. When anyone ever asks what's why should I attend Graduate School at Stockton, the very first thing that I always tell people is because of our amazing faculty. And John is a great example of that in his dedication to this institution and his students. He is a phenomenal faculty member that I have just heard.

The best things about his classes as well as his colleagues within this program. So if you're considering it, that is the reason above all else is the amazing faculty that you have the chance to learn from. So John, thank you. Enjoy your next class and.

Yeah.

Thank you so much, Jen. I, I would go in there too that I appreciate what you said. Also, the cohort of graduate students is very, there's a lot of community and collaboration among our students. So it's a way to kind of build an academic identity and community around yourself. You know, I can't say enough good things about this program. Feel free also to reach out to me directly since I have to run. It's not uncommon for me to meet with students in person or via Zoom.

To talk about the program and to talk about your.

Great. Thank you so much for joining us. Alright.

Goals and where where you see yourself and what you are looking for. I'm a huge proponent of this program, but I'm, you know, I'm not a salesman. I want you to make the best decisions for yourself. So any advice you need on graduate programs or professionalization beyond the bachelors degree, I'm happy to answer those questions as well. So thanks so much again and thank you everybody.

Take care, John.

All right, so let's talk a little bit further about how you can apply. So you'll notice here there are two ways to apply for admission here into the graduate program for American Studies. The first one is through our general application and the second is through our direct entry application. So direct entry is for anyone who is currently here at Stockton or has left just within the last year, graduated within the last year and meets the GPA requirement on our direct entry website.

Uh, the general application we'll talk about a little bit further, but the direct entry allows you to, there's no letters of recommendation, There's no application fee. Umm, and so it's a much shorter application process. Now our general application is not so bad either though. So let's talk in detail about all of that. So the very first thing is you'll begin by logging in. You'll be given your contact information to us. There is an application fee.

To begin your application, you may be eligible for a waiver and if you have questions about that, just reach out to us and let us know.

If you've not received one already. If you are eligible.

And then the next part is it's called submitting your application. And so it's not really submitting it for review. You're just submitting the application fee or the waiver code that's going to move you into the next stage of the process to be able to load materials and begin your application. So the first thing that it will ask for are individuals that you would like to have as your references or your letters of recommendation. You will need 3 individuals to put into this field and they're going to do everything electronically you.

Have to collect any materials from them. All you need to do is talk to them ahead of time before you put your their name on your application. Ask them if they'll be, if they're willing, give them a copy of your resume and let them know the timeline for which you're applying so they know how much time they have to get your letters complete. Then you'll be putting in their name, their title and their e-mail address into the application system. And then we will be sending them all the materials that they need to complete. You don't have to do anything else further.

What we want you to know about that are two things. Number one, your letters of recommendation should come from individuals that can speak to your academic success or your professional success. Umm, as much as you know, you might want your next door neighbor who you've known for 20 years to, uh, write a character reference for you. You know, you take in their trash, you mow their lawn. They can't necessarily speak to your academic and your professional success. So that wouldn't be a good, good choice as far as a recommender. What you want is again, someone either who.

Issue in your field of work or a faculty or staff member that have supervised you in an academic setting or a research setting. Those would be ideal candidates for being recommenders.

The next thing we would want you to know is when you put their information in, please make sure that you copy and paste their e-mail in. Don't retype it. I'm sad to say that we have a number of applicants who, you know, the only thing we're waiting on in order to move their application forward is a, a recommender letter. And we come to find out it's because they wrote.com insteadof.com. Umm, you know something silly like that. So we don't want that to happen. So just copy and paste the e-mail address and make sure that it's correct. Umm, it gets to.

The right person.

Um, next you'll have all of your transcripts sent to us. This needs to be transcripted from any two or four year collegiate institution that you attended. So if you had dual degree credits, if you had um.

An associate's degree, a bachelor's degree, another master's degree or doctorate, all of those transcripts need to be sent to us. Umm, whether you only took one or two classes there, it doesn't matter. We'll need to have all of those. Uh, we recommend having them sent electronically. Uh, that's the quickest way. You also get, uh, a receipt stating when it's been sent and when it's been received. So that's also great for you on your part. Umm, and it happens very quickly if you do it electronically.

You can have those sent straight to Stockton or to grad school at Stockton Edu and we will load those to your to your application for you. Um, next you will also need to attach a copy of your resume. And let's, so let's talk a little bit further about these items so your resume can be loaded as a PDF and again, after you submit your application, you'll be able to load that yourself. And then lastly, if you do happen to not meet the 3.0 GPA requirement for this.

It is requested that you either take the GRE or the GMAT or, excuse me, the MAT.

The GRE or the MAT folks always say, well, which one should I do? And really it comes down to personal preference. These two tests are very, very different. And what I would suggest is going on, uh, going to the Google, go to Google and type the difference between GRE and, and MAT. There's a number of really great videos. They're super short and you can watch those umm, and read the descriptions between the two and then just make a personal decision on what would work best for you. Umm, your test taking, uh.

And, and timing and all of that, but we don't have a particular preference or a score requirement. We really looked for you to choose the one that you think would work best for you. And that's again, if you have a 29 or below, you would need to do that. So all of this can be found on our website and there is a link that I've dropped in the chat. And so you're welcome to to go to that for more details as well. And again, the direct entry requirements that we spoke about.

It would need to be a three, two or higher on your program.

3-4 or higher.

Excuse me, a cumulative 3 two or a program GPA of a 3-4? We can talk more with you about that if you have questions.

So with that being said, I want to give you the contact information for Doctor O'Hara. He'd be happy to answer any additional questions that you have. Umm, our contact information is also on the links that I put in the chat. And you can schedule an appointment with any one of our graduate, uh, admission counselors to follow up with any questions. Umm, if you do have any questions, you can drop them in the chat. I don't see any at this time, umm, but I would again suggest that, uh, you could, you can make an appointment with him.

As well as myself or any one of the folks in our office to follow up further. So we thank you so much for taking the time today. We hope that you see that this program could be maybe a good fit for you and we'd love to see you applying here in the near future. All right, we hope everyone has a wonderful day. And again, with no questions in the chat, we'll talk with everyone soon. Take care, have a great day. Bye bye.