Harnessing Student Initiative Reviewing the summer and outside employment records of our graduate students suggests that our students have already chosen to direct their energies into public intellectual activites, working at libraries, radio stations, newspapers, and advocacy groups. By incorporating this energy into the curricular and funding structure of the program, we hope to support our students' outside engagement and encourage a more direct relationship between their community and university work.

Reaching Beyond University Walls The purpose and main emphasis of the Duke graduate program in English is to create future scholars who will work in academic contexts. At the same time, the roles of scholar and public intellectual are not at all mutually exclusive. By implementing a program that will afford students opportunities to apply their research and communication skills in other venues we hope to foster in them an early sensibility of public engagement.l

Flexible Training for Multiple Audiences By creating a space within the program for students to gain experience in other intellectual forums, we hope to encourage students to begin considering early on the applicability of their training to a range of cultural sites and institutions.

Early Implementation While our department remains committed to training graduate students in scholarly research and pedagogy, we are also excited by the intellectual challenges and opportunities to work across intellectual communities this project will afford. Though we also considered focusing such opportunities in the final years of the program, we decided in favor of exposing students as early as possible to a wider range of intellectual opportunities. This integrated experience, we believe, will afford students a broader context in designing their courses of study and will foster wider ambition in the framing of research fields and dissertation topics.

Structuring Experience Our goals in implementing this program: 1) To integrate public activity with the program. By allotting a summer term mid-way through the program rather than a year towards the end, students are invited to use their outside experience in shaping their academic inquiry. 2) To ensure that students are performing structured intellectual work in their externships. This will require a close working relationship between the department and the outside venues in which student will work and initiative on the part of the student to find and foster projects that will fit in with their goals.

Assessment Students will keep records of their outside work and reflect upon its relationship to their academic program. The various outside institutions will also submit evaluations of student participation.