My 100: Julia Halprin Jackson, M.A. '12
UC Davis Graduate Studies is celebrating 100 years of graduate education in Davis this academic year!
In the fall of 1925, the university’s first 12 graduate students came here to study agriculture. Over the last century, those dozen graduate students working in a single discipline transformed into a community of more than 7,000 graduate students from around the globe working across the arts, humanities and STEM fields and over 80,000 graduate alumni. It's a remarkable story of growth, discovery, innovation and leadership. But what does a century of graduate education look like? It looks like the work that each of our current and former graduate students are doing right now.
Julia Halprin Jackson graduated with an M.A. in creative writing (fiction) in 2012 and here she shares her story.
Julia's "My 100"
A native Davisite, it was a dream to return to my hometown to earn my graduate degree in creative writing in 2010. I learned so much about writing fiction, nonfiction and prose poetry from the likes of Pam Houston, Lucy Corin, Yiyun Li, Alan Williamson, Lynn Freed, and many more. I gained a sense of literary community, and more so, literary citizenship, from the cohort who came before me, as well as the fiction writers and poets in my class. I enjoyed helping steward the graduate literary reading series and was grateful to receive a graduate student fellowship to attend the Tomales Bay Writers Workshops alongside my classmates and friends Marissa Tinloy Eisengart and Alex Russell. Marissa, Alex and fellow fiction writer Jon Ford and I recently resurrected a monthly online writers critique group, which has been both a lot of fun and tremendously productive. I'm also so proud of fellow Aggie writers Megan Cummins, Maria Kuznetsova, Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Nora Bergamino for their recent and forthcoming books. When I see their names on book covers or in journals, it makes me so happy.
I'd also like to shout out Anthropology Professor Dr. Suad Joseph, who took me under her wing during my first year at Davis, and taught me a lot about grant writing and technical writing. Thanks to her, I was able to secure funding as a graduate research assistant, and later my first full-time work in higher education marketing.
Since graduating from Davis, I've worked as a writer and editor in higher education, first at UCSC Silicon Valley Extension and later at San José State University. At SJSU, I've been lucky to contribute to our SJSU NewsCenter and our university magazine, where I now serve as managing editor. So many of the skills that I developed as a writer and editor at UCD carry over to my work at SJSU, and I'm also proud to share that I'm still writing, submitting and publishing short fiction and nonfiction pieces. I'm currently querying the novel that grew out of my master's thesis and am hard at work on a second manuscript, which, as it happens, is set in Davis.
Cultivating Minds, Seeding Change
Current graduate students are encouraged to submit their own videos highlighting their scholarship and research through our "My 100" campaign to help Graduate Studies honor this centennial and showcase the impact of our graduate education community.