Echoes of an Institute: Veterans of the National Writing Project Reflect upon Returning to Graduate School

College teachers essentially became students again in June 2001, as they concentrated on academic reading and writing under the tight deadlines of a summer immersion program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Six of these mid‐career students, including myself, were women who had been through the National Writing Project within the previous five years. I conducted personal interviews with the other five of them to study the impact of the Writing Project experience on their academic and emotional attitudes as they again returned to the role of student in the doctoral program in rhetoric and linguistics. Their observations were close to my own: the experience of the National Writing Project had prepared them not only for the immersion quality of the summer program itself, but for conversation within the discipline of writing instruction, a field that in recent years has been developing its own voice in the academy.