This week has been a bit of a blur, but I feel quite accomplished nonetheless. I discussed taking a big step last week with Dr. Snyder. She had previously mentioned that I should consider presenting at the upcoming Phi Alpha Theta regional conference but we determined it would be best if I just “sat in” this year since I have yet to attend any academic conferences. My lack of something to present also hampered that particular aspiration. However, my Medieval Society and Civilization instructor happened to email me about applying for the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF). After a few emails back and forth with Dr. Snyder regarding the opportunity, I was ready to dive in! Dr. Snyder has agreed to be my mentor for this fellowship if it is granted and she’s already spent a lot of her own time working with me on my proposal. I have had a few meetings this week in preparation for submitting my SURF application, including a resume critique with UCF’s career services as well as meeting with the Office of Undergraduate Research to ascertain their preferences. I’m extremely excited and very hopeful to hear if I will be granted the fellowship opportunity as I know it is a very competitive program.
While Dr. Snyder and I worked on my SURF proposal, we also accomplished my mid-term internship evaluation. I’m still glowing from reading her words of praise. She said that I have contributed more to the History Lab than most of her graduate students who have worked on the project. She also said that she considers me to be “disciplined, enthusiastic, and thorough” which is just delightful to hear!
This week brought about the first round of one-on-one tutoring sessions with students! Owen had more requests than I did, but I did get to work with a student from Dr. Snyder’s WOH 4272 Age of Atlantic Revolutions course. The assignment the student needed help with was a two-page response paper on the book Empire Divided by Andrew O'Shaughnessy. This particular student did not want to do a Zoom session so she sent me drafts of her paper and I helped her make multiple rounds of revisions. Many of the suggestions I made came straight from Dr. Snyder’s helpful list of frequently used comments, but I also assisted her with some grammatical issues as well as guided her away from some formatting and citation issues that would have undoubtedly cost her points on Dr. Snyder’s rubric. The student was quite nice to work with and received my feedback positively. There were a few technical issues from her end, but I was able to walk her through what needed to be done. In the future, I would love to find a way for students to upload their paper to a "cloud" type web app so that we don't have to email versions back and forth. I know this is something that exists with Google Docs and Microsoft Word as well, but I want to research what might be the easiest and most accessible to use for students.
To maximize our effectiveness as tutors, I have created an exit survey to send to students to gauge the usefulness of the services Owen and I are providing as well as to give us input for changes that might be necessary to ensure our tutoring sessions are as beneficial as they can be. I will be providing Dr. Snyder with this data at a later time when we have enough collected to present.