This week we began with an afternoon meeting on President’s Day to go over the plan for beginning to work with students in the coming weeks. Dr. Snyder added us to the courses we would be working with; Owen to HIS4150 (History and Historians) and myself to WOH4272 (Age of Atlantic Revolutions). Dr. Snyder introduced us to her students as “advanced upper-level students” and I have to say, I was tickled pink to be considered “advanced” by Dr. Snyder, even if she is only talking about what level of courses I’ve completed. Students will email us when they need assistance and then we can set up appointments with them through the Canvas system if they wish to have a Zoom tutoring session with us. We also went over the procedure for reviewing drafts of students’ papers and leaving appropriate comments and suggestions for corrections. Dr. Snyder emphasized the importance of our tone and language when making comments to students. I will be approaching it with the mindset of “what would I like to hear if I were in their shoes?” I’m confident in my abilities for both of these tasks and looking forward to working with students one-on-one. Dr. Snyder informed the students in my assigned course that she would be extending the due date of their upcoming response paper on Empire Divided so that they would have time to work with a tutor if they desired. Thus far, I haven’t had any emails from students.
In the meantime, I intend to continue working on my visual citation guide. I have submitted the first guide to Dr. Snyder and it is currently awaiting approval. I asked her during our meeting about which type of primary sources she sees used most often in the History Department so that I can determine the priority for creating source guides. She asked that I work on a guide for translations as well as a guide for older JSTOR articles that contain direct transcriptions of sources. Those will be the first guides I will tackle in between seeing students. She also mentioned that she believes that the VCC guide was created using Microsoft Publisher, so I am going to see about using that to create the guides as opposed to the more time consuming Canva system that I mentioned last week.
Overall, my work load is moving fairly smoothly and I’m having no issues keeping up with this internship in addition to my current course load, which was something I was slightly concerned about. I know things will only pick up from here, but I’m confident that if I can keep myself organized and try to get ahead on my courses when possible, I’ll be able to stay on the right track.