I was accepted into the MFA in Creative Writing program at Southern New Hampshire University – my classes start April 17th! I very excited about this program for several reasons:
- It focuses on writing popular fiction novels. When I wrote out a list of what I wanted in an MFA program this was at the top of my list. While I think the whole literary fiction v. popular fiction thing is a little odd anyway, I wanted a program that would let me work on the kinds of books I write. SNHU has tracks in contemporary, romance, YA, and speculative fiction. The only hard part is choosing which one to go with since contemporary, YA, and speculative fiction are all applicable (I have love stories too, but I don’t think in modern genre language they are “romances”) My current plan is the speculative fiction track, but I have some time before I have to make that choice.
- There is a built in certificate in teaching writing online. This has made the program a better sell to my current job and is something I’m interested in doing in the future so, yay!
- It’s a fully online program. I think it would be great to do a low-residency program, but it just wasn’t practical for me, and looking at those made me hesitant to jump in. The fully online program is something I can make fit with my life (I hope anyway!) and made me much more confident in my ability to be successful.
- Less academic hoop jumping! I already have two graduate degrees and one of the most difficult parts of those degrees was the thesis/dissertation process. It put a lot on students to form committees, work out how they were supposed to get approval, spend a lot of time coordinating the schedules of very busy (though awesome) faculty members, it was just a massive stressful hassle. At SNHU the thesis process is built in to the coursework – not a separate part of the program, so I’m very happy about that.
The only hard part now is waiting until April 17th!
Jenel Alan 