We want to begin by orienting you quickly in this location where we count ourselves lucky to be: in the English Department at Queens College.

We know that some of you may know quite a bit about the department and the college, while others may be new to all of this. Some may be experienced teachers, while others will enter the classroom for the first time in the fall. Here are some things we think you will want to know, either way.

Most of these facts are readily available elsewhere, and there are piles of others that are interesting and useful to know on these subjects, too. But we’re highlighting the features of our institutional landscape that we think will be the most relevant to you as a new instructor in our department.

ABOUT QC
Enrolling nearly 17,000 students, Queens is a four-year college in the CUNY system. These are the biggest majors on campus, in order:

1. Psychology
2. Accounting
3. Economics
4. Sociology
5. English Literature

It is significant for us in a good way that that English ranks so high on this list. It gives the college a material investment in the work we do, and we realize the benefits of that as a department.

In 2019, our college president– Félix Matos-Rodríguez– became the Chancellor of CUNY., so we will welcome a new President in the fall: Frank H. Wu.

The net cost of attending QC is about $24,500 per year. Most of our students fund that expense in all or part with student loans, which total about $23,500 per student on average.

As of 2018, the college has 1,648 faculty members. Of those, 608 are full-time and 1,040 are part-time.

If you’re interested in learning more about the college and where it sees itself today, you may want to read the Biennial Report— which is more interesting than it sounds– from 2019.

ABOUT QC STUDENTS
Nearly 75% of the student body studies full-time, and about the same proportion live in Queens. Our students are diverse by almost every measure, as one would expect given the demographics of the borough.

Ethnicity

• 29.4% Asian
• 8.4% Black or African American
• 29.1 Hispanic
• 25.6% white
  Queens College has official recognition as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI).

Education

• 74.2% of our students graduated from a NYC public high school
• 8.5% graduated from an NYC private parochial school
• 14.3% graduated from a NYS high school outside of NYC
• 1.6% graduated from a foreign high school

Language
Nearly 35% of our students were born outside of the U.S., and 70% know a language other than English. 36% say their first language is a language other than English

The other languages that are most widely spoken among our students are Chinese (Mandarin) and Spanish.

ABOUT THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

The English Department has approximately 112 teaching faculty. Of those, about 65 teach part-time. Our chair has been Karen Weingarten, but she is stepping down– and we’re sorry to see her go!– so we will elect a new chair at our department meeting on April 24.

Creative and critical writers work together in our department, and part-time faculty teach upper division courses every semester. For this reason and others, it’s useful for you to know a bit about the curriculum within and beyond the major.

After ENG 110 and ENG 130, a student who chooses to major in English gets an introduction to it in English 170W. Then they proceed to the courses in Genre, History, and Theory that are the backbone of the major (aka, English 240s).Finally, they take a senior seminar, English 391W, which is the capstone to the major. 

Part-time faculty sometimes have opportunities to teach upper-division courses in creative writing and literature. We are in the process of developing a writing minor, and those of you who are in the MFA program may teach creative writing at some point in the future. If you do, you’ll find invaluable resources on the blog for instructors of ENG 210. And if you’re a graduate student at the GC or a part-time faculty member with the Ph.D., you may be assigned literature courses in the major (see above) or electives in the Gen Ed curriculum.

The courses we teach in FYW provide the foundation for all of this. To begin thinking about how you’ll teach your class in the fall, as you’ll see when you read on.

But first: What questions come up for you at this point, about:

• Our students;
• Our department;
• What it’s like to teach at QC;
• How the curriculum of the English major works;
• How creative and critical writers work together in the English Department;
• How ENG 110 leads to ENG 130;
• How the Gen Ed curriculum works; or
• Anything else that comes up for you as a reader of this page?