Congratulations Maxwell Studley on Provost’s MQP Award

The PW program is pleased to announce that the winner of the Provost’s MQP Award for the most outstanding project in Professional Writing for 2019 is Maxwell Studley for his  project entitled Identity Formation in Paramedic Education, advised by Professor Faber.

For his MQP, Max conducted an ethnographic, participant-observer study of paramedic education. His study traces the role of documentation in technical education as he works to articulate what happens in the so-called “black boxes” of identity formation at work. His project describes how technical workers come to see the world through the unique perspective of their disciplinary fields and how educational forms naturalize and make habitual their specialized skills and knowledge. He uses the term the “Paramedic’s gaze” to describe how this field naturalizes a unique and specialized way of seeing, being, and operating. By narrating medical case studies of his own work as a pre-hospital care provider he describes his own acculturation into the specialty field of paramedicine and his own experiences of the “black boxing” of key elements of this transition.

We would also like to give a special acknowledgement to Carla Romo for her second-place project titled Public Perceptions of Second Generation Biofuels (advised by Professor Higgins) and Caroline Flynn for her third-place project titled The Challenges and Importance of Standard Operating Procedures in Small Businesses: A Case Study with Purgatory Beer Company (advised by Professor Madan).

Finally, congratulations to all PW seniors for their hard work and success on their MQP projects.