Blog 12

            Being a tutor has most definitely had changed the way that I look at college, approach student life, and understand the system of education. Tutoring has improved my commitment, allowed me to feel comfortable setting higher, more distant goals, improved my understanding of writing, and allowed me to see many varieties of writing. My enjoyment of tutoring has also changed my goals and opened up new career possibilities that I hadn’t previously perceived to be fitting for me. Tutoring is the first job I really pursued with a sure sense of interest. It is the first job that I felt I could find myself enjoying for a long period of time.

Around the time when I started tutoring was when my changed opinion of university really began to take hold. Before entering college I was skeptical about whether or not it was fitting for what I wanted. I knew of the many varieties of subjects and career paths that college made available; however, I was skeptical that any of them were fitting for me.

Luckily, I was sold early on in my first semester. I had a lot of great teachers and started having new ideas about what I might want to do in the future. And it was just after I began contemplating changing my double majors from Psychology and Philosophy to Philosophy and English when I came across the Writing Center. I had thought sort of half-heartedly about teaching English, and I thought it might be a good opportunity to find out if I was interested in English. I had already gotten another job working on computers, for which my interest was waning.

Having originally asked for an OA position, thinking that I would watch other tutors work to see if I wanted to tutor down the road, I was very excited to instead jump right into tutoring. I began reading and reviewing papers with students, and this allowed me a certain amount of experience that I had not previously had. Before, I only had my own drafts to work with; now I could look at the writing process literally from beginning to end and try to analyze and work out a kind of general process for writing in general, and I also learned about the sort of hierarchy of writing concerns which essentially amounts to the same sort of process.

I feel that my work in the writing center has helped me solidify my skill of writing, and now, my main concern is working on solid argumentation and expanding the complexity of my writing. Along with this, I am sure there are some larger and more fundamental concerns which I will run into along the way, but I think that my work in the writing center has definitely improved the construction process of my essays as well as the way I look at and approach my education.