Graduation season has fallen upon us again, and the Crow team is ecstatic to congratulate our graduating Crowbirds. While we are proud all year long of all of the wonderful accomplishments these individuals have achieved, we would like to take this particular moment to highlight their experiences.
Sarah Buwick, Purdue University
Sarah Buwick is an undergraduate researcher at Purdue University. She has been a Crow team member since Fall 2023 and has been involved in website development, Constructive Distributed Work (CDW), and other Crow-related projects. Alongside Dr. Ola Swatek, Sarah redesigned the Crow website which launched in December 2024, implementing the branding toolkit developed by Purdue alumna Anna Shura. As a part of her work with CDW, Sarah presented two research posters with Naomi Islas on collaborative coding, and co-developed a coding framework and onboarding activity to help streamline Crow’s future coding projects.
Sarah is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Writing with minors in Communication and Creative Writing. In addition to her work with Crow, Sarah was an active member of University Lutheran Church (ULu) where she frequently volunteered, sang in the student choir, and played the flute in a small ensemble. Following commencement, Sarah will be returning home to the Chicago area where she hopes to pursue a career in publishing or internal communications.
Naomi Islas, Purdue University
Naomi Islas is an undergraduate research assistant at Purdue University. She joined the Crow team in Fall 2023 and has since worked on the grant writing team, Constructive Distributed Work (CDW) team, and other projects. With Bradley Dilger and other fellow Crowbirds, she created the internal infrastructure for Crow’s NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant application in 2023–24. While working on the CDW team, Naomi presented two poster presentations with Sarah Buwick on their collaborative coding work and development of an onboarding activity framework for new Crow researchers, drawing upon their previous coding experiences.
Naomi is graduating from Purdue with a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Writing with minors in Law and Society and Organizational Leadership. While at Crow, she also maintained a second position at Purdue as Student Manager in Ford Dining Court, where she helped achieve Purdue’s record-breaking 5 million meals served for AY2024–25. After graduation, Naomi will be returning home to Indianapolis where she intends to pursue a career in the technical writing field.
Wei Xu, University of Arizona
Dr. Wei Xu is a graduate of the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona. She joined the Crow team in Fall 2023 when she worked with Dr. Shelley Staples as an intern at Crow. Since then, she has been working with the Constructive Distributed Work (CDW) team and has been part of the grant writing team. At the same time, she led the project of Multimodality and Crow, working with a group of researchers at the University of Arizona on coding and analyzing multimodal corpora in first-year writing classrooms at UofA. In April, at CCCC, she facilitated a workshop on assessing students’ multimodal works and presented her dissertation project at the conference. She also recently began to serve as a CCCC proposal reviewer and coach.
Her dissertation focuses on multilingual genre knowledge development in first-year writing classrooms. She has recently defended her dissertation and has accepted a position of tenure-track Assistant Professor in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, with a specialization in Second Language Writing, at Northern Illinois University. Dr. Xu is excited about the new chapter of her life and wishes to stay with Crow after joining her new position. She looks forward to the opportunities of continuing to collaborate with the excellent scholars in the Crow team.
Sara Leila, University of Arizona
Sara Leila is a graduate researcher from the University of Arizona. She joined the Crow team in Fall 2024, working with Dr. Shelley Staples as an intern. Sara worked on development of the Crow Corpus, focusing on learner corpora from foundational composition courses. One of the most notable things she worked on during her internship was having the opportunity to be the primary coder on a case study about instructors’ evolving understanding through corpus-based pedagogy and presenting the findings at the Symposium on Second Language Writing.
Sara is graduating with a MA in Teaching English as a Second Language (MATESL). Her capstone project was a course design proposal titled genre Analysis & Linguistic Landscape Analysis: Exploring Social Issues Through Texts in Public Space. The study focuses on genre analysis of linguistic landscapes that highlight social issues such as racism, feminism, social justice, and more. Throughout a half-semester project, SLW students will analyze the genres of public signs, advertisements, and graffiti to understand how different genres are used to communicate these issues, in addition to conducting a linguistic landscape analysis. In the upcoming future, Sara plans to pursue a Ph.D. focusing on genre-based pedagogy and corpus-based pedagogy in second language writing. She recently was admitted to the SLAT PhD program at the University of Arizona.
Samantha Leones, University of Arizona
Samantha Leones is an undergraduate researcher from the University of Arizona. She joined the Crow team in Fall 2024, working for Dr. Shelley Staples. Samantha is graduating with a BA Major in English and Minor Professional and Technical Writing. She worked with Crow’s grant writing team on NEH DHAG and wrote weblog posts about conferences where Crow participated.
Samantha has been nominated for the SBS Tenacity Award, which recognizes a graduating senior in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences who has persevered in the face of significant and adverse circumstances to earn their degree.