The Writing Center

Apply to be a Tutor

UW-Green Bay has roughly five thousand students, but the Writing Center employs only about five student tutors during any given school year. Thus, we can afford to set extremely high standards in choosing student tutors. Our tutors almost always have an overall GPA comfortably over 3.5, and usually have a 4.0 or very close to one in courses in which the grade was determined mainly through writing assignments.

We look for four things in a Writing Center tutor:

• Outstanding writing ability and ability to evaluate strengths and weaknesses in other people's writing.
• The "people skills" to work effectively in one-to-one conferences.
• Reliability and a strong work ethic.
• Certainty that the student will remain at UWGB for at least three more semesters. It takes a substantial portion of a semester to train a new tutor before the tutor actually begins working in the Writing Center, so after the time and effort we invest in training, we'd like to be sure the tutor will work for us for at least two more semesters.

The first step in becoming a Writing Center tutor is to contact the Director of the Writing Center, Brian Sutton, either at suttonb@uwgb.edu, at 465-2027, or in his office in CL 109A, adjacent to the Writing Center. It also helps if you can get a former teacher who knows your writing to recommend you as a prospective tutor. Brian will ask you to provide him with three samples of your writing-preferably term papers rather than creative writing projects (because we mainly tutor students writing term papers, not those completing creative writing projects), and preferably somewhat varied assignments for varied classes and teachers.

Brian and a second writing teacher, Carol Van Egeren, will read your writing and decide if we believe you write well enough to become a Writing Center tutor. (And if we turn you down, please keep in mind the earlier point about hiring just five tutors in a school of about 5,000 students; we've often turned down students whose writing struck us as A or A- work.)

If we believe you write well enough, we'll ask you to go through the training program. This consists of weekly meetings of about an hour at a time, with a little homework in between - reading about tutoring and also reading sample rough drafts and considering what advice you'd give to the authors of those drafts. The weekly sessions often involve practice tutoring sessions dealing with those drafts. The training program usually lasts around six weeks. We can't pay you for this, but you can sign up for it as a one-credit, independent-study class.

If all goes well during the training, you start tutoring, usually at the beginning of the next semester. We try to accommodate your preferences in terms of hours - not giving you more work hours than you can handle, and scheduling time slots so that they fit well with your classes and any other obligations.

So if you have outstanding writing skills, good people skills, and a strong work ethic, and if you'll be attending UWGB for at least three more semesters, we hope you'll contact Brian Sutton about the possibility of becoming a Writing Center tutor!