Major Qualifying Projects
The MQP (or senior project) is the culmination of a Professional Writing major's education. Professional Writing MQPs are self-designed, in consultation with a faculty advisor and, when relevant, a sponsoring organization.
Depending on the project, Professional Writing majors work in a range of media (print, digital, video) and genres (such as websites, brochures, online documents, feature articles, instructional material, posters, and newsletters) to demonstrate their skills in writing and visual design. Professional Writing majors draw on their study in writing, rhetoric, and literacy to analyze the context of their project, to design documents that communicate in useful and accessible ways, and to explain the significance of their work.
Recent Professional Writing projects have been completed for sponsoring organizations, including the redesign of a homepage for Texas Instruments, health communication about the risks of breast cancer to women treated by radiation for Hodgkins disease, the development of training materials for lay educators on diabetes, and the design of public relations for a community organization in London.
Other MQPs have carried out popular science projects that design documents to explain the significance of scientific findings to a broad audience of readers, on topics such as mad cow disease, hepatitis C in Vietnam Veterans, competing theories of the origins of AIDS, and the London "killer fog" of 1952.
Still other projects have analyzed mass media, digital literacy, and visual design, including studies of women's magazine covers from 1930 to 1980, video games, MUDs, advertising, the uptake of new writing technologies in a nonprofit, the use of comics in education, and punk style in graphic design.
Professional Writing majors interested in journalism are able, with the approval of the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, to do an internship at the newspaper. A recent internship involved the redesign of the Infocenter page for readers on the newspaper's website, combined with an ethnographic study of the cultures of the newsroom and of the online department.
Maintained by webmaster@wpi.eduLast modified: March 20, 2008 10:51:36