Thoughts About Being a Tutor

It's good for you, and for your peers as well.

Originally published on April 17, 2017

Tutoring is a core part of the academics of a university, though not everyone takes advantage of it or even knows that they can become a tutor. It wasn’t something I thought about until a professor recommended me for a class and I went with it. I’ve been a tutor for 3 semesters now, for several different classes, and I’ve collected a few thoughts about the whole thing.

For one thing, I treat tutoring like a small, second job. Of course it is always nice to make a little extra money, especially when it is a subject I enjoy relearning about and going over and explaining. The only thing that it costs you is some time, which if you treat it like a job it will be easy to figure out a few blocks of time. The best part of this “job” is the familiar subject material. You easily get excited about it and you want others to be excited about it.

Tutoring is a way to help out your university, not exactly to “give back and serve”, but more of in the sense of contributing to the overall success of the university. You are helping your peers succeed, people you will meet up with for a few weeks and then never see again, or people in your major whom you will get to know better over the years and will continue on in their degrees partially thanks to your contribution. Maybe all the students want out of their tutoring is a little motivation to learn the material in these core classes we’re all forced to take. And that’s fine. Everything is really all up to the students, how much effort they put into all of this.

I’ve found that tutoring is good for me too, to go over old subjects that I enjoyed and reteach myself the small details about the subjects. There’s a reason I chose to tutor these certain core classes, and not just major classes. For anyone looking to be a tutor, those are the classes you want to go for. There are many students who will need your help. By this point, you’ve been in college for several semesters and are bound to have picked up a few study tricks. Passing these tricks on will help those freshmen looking for help do well and continue to do well in their future semesters.

Now, I don’t want to be a teacher after I graduate. There wasn’t ever much of a desire for it, and tutoring didn’t really change that. However, I will continue to be a tutor. There’s a sense of accomplishment when a student you have been with for a few weeks gets a B on an exam when they failed the first one. Again, it’s not all completely up to you. But knowing you helped is enough. And getting to get others excited about subjects you enjoy while getting paid for it is definitely a perk. As far as ways to spend my evenings, I could think of a few worse ones.