One of the best parts of booking an appointment is the guarantee that you’ll be working one-on-one with a tutor. You don’t have to “compete” for their attention.

Walk-ins, especially the closer we get to finals week, become a hot-spot for students seeking help. This is to be expected, and a great sight to see from a tutor’s perspective.

Working with a huge group of students in need of your help can be super intimidating. Recently, what seemed like the entire EXP Major dropped into the Learning Center to get writing help. I was incredibly overwhelmed- the majority of students were super tall, mountain men that left me, tiny in comparison, feeling trapped. Luckily, another writing tutor was called in to help with the overflow.

Once we got them all sat down, I handed out the sign-in sheet and asked them all to pull out the assignments they’d like to work on and I’d start hopping from one to the next to see what I could help them with.

Tutoring in a large group, specifically for writing, can be a challenge. There’s not a “short task” you can really assign a student to start them off with, move on to the next student, and then eventually check back in with them.

I remember asking, “So what exactly is this assignment, and what are your goals for it?” I think, in retrospect, that was a great first question to ask. Because all of the students were in the same major- and because the major was so small they were all taking the same classes- a lot of the assignments overlapped. I was able to help the majority at the same time, dedicating time to check-in with individuals when they wanted more in-depth help.

By the end of my walk-in, I felt like I made some serious project with these students. I know that since the walk-in a lot of EXP kids have been seeking out tutoring, for both walk-ins and appointments. I’m so happy to see that the Learning Center was open to this group of students, especially since they all expressed to me that they’d never been in there before!

This event made me proud to be a writing tutor- I made a difference in these students’ educational careers, and now they know of a great resource to use for future classes.

-C.M.