Hamilton College - Alumni Review - Spring 2007 - Work in Progress - Writing Center

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Student tutors, front and center

Counting current student tutors through the Class of '09, there have been 265 of them, and in a world where "the best and the brightest" has become an academic cliché, it's difficult to dig up a substitute phrase that does full justice to their accomplishments and promise. Since 1999, 65 percent of graduating tutors have been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and 92 percent have received College Honors -- cum laude, magna cum laude or summa cum laude. In 2005-06, the 25 tutors won 29 major awards and honors, including a Fulbright Grant.

"This is a coveted job, a very prestigious position on campus," Williams says. "Tutors have to have strong writing skills, of course, but they also have to be able to analyze and talk about someone else's writing. And thirdly, they have to have an interpersonal style that's going to work."

Karin Gosselink '94, a two-year tutor who is now a lecturer in writing at Yale after earning a Ph.D. in English at Rutgers last summer, says those interpersonal skills are honed through the "collaborative techniques" that the Writing Center teaches and encourages, techniques that she now draws on in the workplace: "asking questions, drawing up a list of options or goals, discussing how my staff could contribute to those goals. I think it's this kind of collaboration that I learned in the Writing Center that has helped me the most professionally."

About 25 students now serve as tutors in an average semester. The range in 2005-06 was typical: 13 seniors, seven juniors and five sophomores from 17 departments and concentrations. Nominated by professors and selected and trained by Williams, the group was drawn not only from the obvious disciplines -- creative writing, English, government, history -- but also from biology, chemistry, mathematics, Asian studies and Hispanic studies, among others. That multidisciplinary approach reflects the center's role in Hamilton's commitment to writing-intensive instruction across the curriculum, a facet of the modern College's mission that was codified by many of the same faculty members who conceived the Writing Center more than two decades ago.

"I think that writing across the curriculum is crucial," says one of them, Nancy Rabinowitz, the Margaret Bundy Scott Professor of Comparative Literature. "It gives students the correct impression that writing is important as a tool for conveying their ideas, regardless of the setting."

"We started with the philosophy that every student benefits from attention to writing," says Professor of Biology Ernest Williams, who also served on the original writing committee and the concurrent Committee on Academic Policy. Ernest Williams had arrived at Hamilton shortly before the committee began its work, already sold on the importance of writing in the sciences. He had attended a 1981 workshop led by Elaine Maimon, then a pioneer in the writing-across-the-curriculum movement and now chancellor of the University of Alaska Anchorage. "She said something in that workshop that really struck me," he recalls. "She said she was tired of being the first person ever to read a student's paper. It really rang a bell." He realized that not only were his students missing out on their classmates' insights; they often weren't even reading their own papers after writing them.

"So I started incorporating peer review of papers in my own classes, getting people to revise, to emphasize clarity of expression and organization," he says. "The value of what one does in science is greatly diminished if the results cannot be clearly communicated. Clear communication is as important in science as it is in every other discipline."

John Doench '00 agrees. After graduation, the three-year tutor earned a Ph.D. in biology at MIT and now does postdoctoral research on cancer at Harvard as the recipient of a recent grant from the Jane Coffin Childs Foundation. "My writing skills have been tremendously instrumental in whatever success I've had as a scientist," he says. "While doing interesting and fruitful experiments is obviously necessary, being able to write about what you've done and get it published, and likewise to write about what you're going to do and get it funded, is a crucial ability for a successful career in science."

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37,543 - Number of writing conferences held from February 1987, when the Writing Center opened its doors, through December 2006.

84 - Most visits to the Writing Center over four years by a single student. Students typically visit four to six times.

65 - Percentage of graduating tutors elected to Phi Beta Kappa since 1999.

17 - Number of departments and concentrations represented by the 25 writing tutors in 2005-06.

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