The Ott serves graduate students of all kinds: Masters’ students, doctoral students, and professional students from across Marquette’s campus. In the last year alone, the Ott registered more than 200 graduate writers, who came from Arts & Sciences, Business, Dentistry, Engineering, Nursing, and both Occupational and Physical Therapy. Through nearly 500 appointments, trained peer tutors helped graduate students understand new genres of writing, incorporate and document sources effectively, and organize as well as explain complex material to diverse audiences for conference posters and presentations, scholarly publications, and both job and grant applications.

We offer personalized support for graduate writers in the form of weekly or bi-weekly meetings; learn more about our Writing Accountability partners program here. We also offer support for English language learners wanting to practice their spoken and / or their written English; learn more about our SWELL program here.

We celebrate writers and writing all year, through a menu of special events. In fall, we dedicate the month of October to Ottoberfest, when we host competitions and offer special prizes to participating writers. In spring, we observe the Feast of St. Cuthbert, the patron saint of Otters, with an open house on March 20^th, and we collaborate with the MU Libraries to host a day-long transcribe-a-thon on February 14^th in honor of author and activist Frederick Douglass. We also recruit new tutors each fall, and we welcome writers to join us.

We also have answers to the questions that graduate writers frequently ask about the Ott: