The teaching assistantship is a venerable model for funding graduate studies, staffing undergraduate courses, and providing pedagogical support for emerging college and university instructors. In this article, we present a variation of this model of graduate student support: the WAC Fellowship at the City University of New York. Using survey data and interviews with former fellows from one CUNY campus, York College, we explore the impact of the WAC Fellowship on their professional development. Our results suggest that the WAC Fellowship does a better job of preparing graduate students for life as faculty members than traditional teaching assistantships for three reasons: the WAC fellowship we studied provides an opportunity for training in and reflection on writing and WAC pedagogy, exposure to the types of service and administrative work that form a significant part of a faculty member's working life, and a structure for mentoring and collaborative learning that allows graduate students to develop as professionals in academe. In addition, the WAC-specific pedagogies woven into the fellowship shape fellows' conceptions of both the value of writing for learning in discipline-based courses and the importance of the writing process.