Academic Advising

During the fall of each student's first year, the MFA Director will start an individual MFA Advising Sheet for each student. That sheet guides the MFA student through the program, especially at each new semester's registration period, and becomes the touchstone for the Director and the MFA student to return to for academic advising.

The sample sheet below also provides an overview of the program's entire academic architecture, requirements for each genre, and courses required of Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs).

The MFA Director is available for advising questions at any time. The director schedules face-to-face meetings for all first-year students, Zoom meetings for all second-year students, and meetings as necessary or requested for third-year students.  Meetings are held in October before registration opens for the Spring semester. Spring registration opens for graduate students in late October, and Fall registration opens in mid-April.

While there is some strategic scaffolding to the way courses can be taken, there is no one set path through the program except for the required courses and when students are required to take them. Here are some things to think about, and every student will think about them differently:

• As with any MFA program, Workshop is the heart-and-soul of the experience. Workshop elements tend to seep into almost every course, but students only have 9 credits (3 courses) to work with in the program architecture. We recommend that while students acclimate themselves to graduate study in general and Mason's MFA community in particular, they do not take a workshop in their first semester. Looking down the road, students may also prefer not to take a workshop in their final semester, or perhaps even in the Fall of their final year, while they focus on crafting their thesis.
  
  
• Speaking of the Workshop, program administration is rethinking the distinction between so-called "regular" 600-level Workshops and "advanced" Workshops. For the prose faculty, there is no distinction. For the poetry faculty, there is a foundation laid in 600 that is built upon further in 700-level Workshop. Until a change is approved and university systems are updated, each student still must take at least one 700-level Workshop course.
  
  
• Each student is required to take one 1-credit section of ENGH 699 Visiting Writers in their genre. Thereafter, some students elect to take two more 699s to fill up one 3-credit Elective slot, while others decide to take some other course for 2 credits and pair it with that required 699.
  
  
• Summer courses are allowable, but few courses that fulfill MFA program requirements are offered. An MFA faculty member may offer a course, or a student could pick up a graduate-level Literature requirement. Note, for funded students, a summer course's tuition waiver counts toward the following academic year's 18 credits of tuition waiver. For example, if a student takes a summer course for 3 credits, they have 15 total credits left to use in the following Fall and Spring semesters combined.
  
  
• A recent trend among GTAs has been to take only 6 credits (2 courses) in the Fall of their second year to allow for more energy to be devoted to teaching their sections of ENGH 101 Composition. Once GTAs complete 18 credits in their first year (required by the Commonwealth of Virginia for graduate instructors to be eligible to teach), registering for 6 credits per semester is acceptable. Registering for 6 credits is considered full-time enrollment; however, keep in mind that each funded student is allocated 18 credits of tuition waiver each academic year (it's a "use it or lose it" sort of situation). 
  
  
• Graduate-level courses in the English Department or graduate-level courses offered by other departments or other colleges might be acceptable as Elective options (or in some cases, perhaps a Literature requirement). Sometimes, program administration will inquire as to how a course outside of the MFA program supports a student's scholarship or informs their writing. The best advice is to always check with the graduate academic coordinator and the MFA Director.

A typical trajectory through the 48-credit MFA program, especially for GTAs, is 9/9 6/9 9/6 credits per year, Fall/Spring semesters.  In a student's final semester, only the credits remaining to complete the program are necessary to make that student considered registered full-time with funding benefits; therefore, that trajectory might look like 9/9 9/9 9/3.

Other students might navigate the program at a slower pace, such as 3 or 6 credits per semester. A different pace usually only has implications when it comes to making Thesis Director requests, which are submitted in the fall (for poetry students) or spring (for prose students) of the academic year in which the student is projected to earn their 36th credit. Such students need to keep track of when they expect to reach that plateau.

Note: Every student must complete the MFA program within six academic years. That clock begins ticking with the first semester a student is enrolled, and does not stop ticking if a student takes a semester away from the program. 

Speaking of time away from the program, which happens occasionally as "life" happens, one semester once during the course of a student's studies is typically manageable, but extended periods might invoke policies and conditions that require different strategies. Bottom line, if time away from the program develops as a possibility, contact the Program Director and Graduate Academic Coordinator as soon as possible. 

MFA students must successfully complete 48 credit hours of graduate coursework as described above. Students can transfer up to 23 credits, as appropriate, toward a terminal degree in creative writing from a previously conferred graduate degree that involved graduate-level courses taken within 10 years from the date they enroll in the MFA program (the grade earned in any given graduate course must be a B- or higher). Note: Students who have earned other graduate degrees or certificates at Mason cannot, for example, “triple-dip” credits used toward the graduate degree and again toward the certificate a third time toward the MFA degree. Note: Non-degree graduate students, who apply and are subsequently admitted to the MFA program, can apply up to 12 credits from successfully completed creative writing graduate courses toward the degree-bearing program. Always check with the program director and graduate academic coordinator for eligibility regarding credit transfers to the MFA degree.