Graduation!

With graduation three weeks away, excitement, relief, a bit of uncertainty mixed with a little stress is a good description of how I feel. I just finished preparing for my defense and only need to complete my literature review at this point. It is pretty cool being able to count on one hand the number of assignments standing between me and my Master’s degree—now to enter the real world complete with student loans and job applications. After studying English and Humanities at BYU for five years and learning how to effectively teach for two, I’m pretty excited to find a teaching job and put my education to use.

As far as working at the writing center goes, it seems that the students who are coming in as a the semester is getting more hectic either have awesome papers that just need a little rounding out and tweaking or pretty sketchy papers where the students don’t understand the concept of thesis statements and topic sentences. Although these papers are more difficult to work with, it provides a great opportunity to explain important writing concepts to students and let them apply these concepts to their own work. It can be a little draining when it is one paper after another is in need of some TLC, but it has also been quite satisfying seeing improvements in students’ writing skills.