Video published on September 27, 2019

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Last updated 9/27/2019

 

Audio: Instrumental music

Video: Animated video

Audio: Shawn Picht: Hello Walden University students and welcome to the Academic Skills Center's Savvy Student Podcast. My name is Shawn Picht, and the manager of faculty outreach and student communication for the Academic Skills Center and I am also your host for our upcoming podcast.

Today's podcast is a continuation of my conversation with Walden University student and Doctoral Peer mentor, Megan Bledsoe, about her experiences with the doctoral writing assessment.

You are the first person on the savvy student podcast to complete both the doctoral writing assessment and the Graduate Writing II: Intermediate Composition. I really think this is a great opportunity to discuss those experiences in a general way so what was the doctoral writing assessment process like. I've seen it from the outside but what was it like from the inside from you?

Audio: Megan Bledsoe: For me, it was just very hard to edit myself in a cohesive way, while also still writing something that is a very meaningful topic. Because I'm, I'm so used to just writing you know the research paper and the references and everything like that. So it was a difficult topic for me to write about.

Audio: Shawn: Yeah and it's very different. It's interesting because the doctoral learning assessment is so different than any other paper you will approach throughout your time at Walden because it is a first-person, no references, it's a personal essay. So it is very different than most of stuff I imagine that you've encountered throughout your process at Walden.

Audio: Megan: Exactly! I did not have anything I could Google a jumping-off point from. I just had to write from what was about me. And you know you sit there and you read it and you're like o"h my gosh this sounds so cheesy" but yeah that is what they're going for.

Audio: Shawn: Yeah!  We put out a lot of stuff out there. We have a doctoral writing assessment webinars and website did you take advantage of any of the resources on the website or any the doctoral writing assessment stuff?

Audio: Megan: I did look through some of it. There's a couple of blogs and stuff about tips on there which were really helpful. There was one blog post that really stood out to me and it asked the question "why am I being required to write this?" And I just remember thinking the exact same thing thinking "oh my gosh this is just another thing that I have to do on top of my course load." But it was really it was insightful in that it talks about how you know you still need to measure yourself. And you need to you may be a really great writer on a technical level but you might lack some of the more basic skills as you've gone on and written more papers. 

Audio: Shawn: There's so many ways to be in the know here at the ASC, so until next time Walden students, stay savvy.

Audio: Instrumental music