Spring 2022 Reflection
Isha Devani
June 6, 2022
Working at the WC has been a really great opportunity for me to learn more about my interest in tutoring. Not only this, but this experience has also helped me know how confident I can be in my ability to help others with their work. As Defoe and Caparas concludes from a study that, “tutoring experiences had direct connection to [tutors’] later work and affected their personal development as a writer and their interactions with other people” (as cited in 조수경, 김다희, & 백철, 2020, p. 831). I can agree with this personally through my experience as a novice writing tutor at the WC. One of the best things that I learned about myself as a tutor is my ability to help others brainstorm ideas and accordingly organize their paper. I joined the WC in the middle of the semester which was a challenging factor as I have never taken up this sort of a position before and promptly joining the Writing tutors’ team was nerve wrecking and exciting at the same time. I completed my training in about a week and directly started off with helping students. I was surprised as to how many students I was getting as a fairly new tutor. I was really happy as I was getting quite a lot of satisfactory comments form my students and that made me more motivated to keep helping them. As I was helping students, I kept on learning about new ways of handling them and helping them in their assignments. At the same time, I also learned how to manage my work as a student and the areas I struggle with in writing. Working at the Writing Center also developed my confidence in my own writing assignments.
Being an introvert, it was really difficult for me in the beginning to go out there and talk to students about their assignments, providing feedbacks and leading the session. Working as a tutor surfaced my qualities as a good leader and a tutor. I realized how much I loved helping others in their work and the amount of joy I received in interacting with students and working on their ideas. One of the best parts about working at the WC was that I had the chance to interact with students from all fields of study and different ideas about their topics in hand. Discussing views with the students about the argument they are using for their work, producing new ideas, providing feedbacks, etc., was an amazing opportunity to learn about different fields of study. As a Psychology major student, it was very intriguing for me to connect my understanding of psychological concepts to other fields of study and look for areas common among them. All the above-mentioned aspects contributed to my memorable time at the Writing Center at TWU. Overall, my time at the Writing Centre was short, but the things I learned in those 2 to 3 months was enriching.