First Session 10/16 Reflection

Last week I tutored in the Reading and Writing Center by myself for the first time. I talked to my mentor right before and she gave me some words of wisdom. At that point, knowing she believed in me, I felt more confident. Two cups of coffee down, I was over-energetic for my first appointment.

The girl was preparing a cover letter and resume for job applications. I have never written a cover letter before, so I made sure to tell her I could help her with the writing aspect of it (word choice, looking for sentence fragments, etc.), but I did not know how a cover letter should sound, besides telling employers why they should hire you. She told me that it was perfectly fine because all she needed help with was the writing aspect of it. We read through it together and I made suggestions regarding sentence placement and sentence agreement (is that the term?). Despite the few errors, she sounded confident and enthusiastic, so from my perspective, I thought it was a good cover letter.

The second student I worked with was revising his final draft for an essay in World Religions. I took that class over summer, but I guess they give different assignments to students during the year, so I wasn’t familiar with the paper topic unfortunately. The first thing I noticed was he was missing an introduction, but once looking through the first paragraph, he basically had an introduction within it. I advised him to make a paragraph break and to add a thesis. Besides a few citation errors, missing words, sentence fragments, he presented a really good argument. And I made sure to tell him!

The final student I tutored was working on an application for the Garnet and Gold Society. She had to discuss a personal experience volunteering/helping others that shaped who she was as a person or something. She decided to talk about her experiences in nursing school and working with patients. I built rapport with the student by telling her I have two nurses in my family: my mom and sister! The part of the application that she wanted to work on only had to be 250 words, so we spent the majority of the time picking her brain. She explained to me that she knows what she wants to say, but she doesn’t know how to write it on paper. With that, I asked her to just talk to me about her experiences in the hospital, dealing with patients, and how it made her feel. I was able to work with her and watch her write a really great explanation, just by getting her to talk to me. That strategy really does work!

Overall, I had a great experience tutoring last week and I am excited to continue. All the students were so thankful and sweet, which makes it all worth it!