2
Introduction
A new internship program was developed at Simmons College
1
in the spring of 2004
based on the interest of four groups: a political science department that wanted to
increase the scope and success of its already-established internship program, a Dean’s
office directing resources to a college-wide WAC push, a donor whose philanthropic
foundation commits itself to putting more women in positions of political power, and
state legislators who, when surveyed, said the most desirable skill that an intern could
have would be the ability to write different types government specific pieces (e.g. policy
analyses, grants, press releases). The result of this intersection of demands has been, at
Simmons, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Internship Fellows Program paired with a
new writing intensive course entitled Politics Unplugged: How Things Work in
Massachusetts. I am the faculty coordinator of the internship program as well as the
professor of the course.
For the past two decades, colleges and universities have been implementing “Writing
Across the Curriculum” (WAC) programs to improve the quality of writing for all
students, not just the traditionally writing intensive courses (see Bazerman and Russell,
1994; Cooper and Julier, 1997; Monroe, 2002). Writing is a major component of the
political science major (Goodman and Lanser, 1987), therefore it is no surprise that those
that teach political science have embraced the ideas behind WAC.
1
Simmons College is private university located in the heart of Boston. It includes an undergraduate college
for women (roughly 1900 students), and graduate programs for women and men in social work, health
studies, library and information science, management, and liberal arts.
Convention