College Mentoring Project - Meeting 2

Before our second mentee meeting, I found myself nervous again. This was a different kind of nervousness than the one I felt for our first meeting though. Instead of being concerned about how I would do personally, I was more concerned about how my student would have taken the comments that I made and the points that we discussed last week to re-craft her paper. I was worried that things would remain more or less the same, or that perhaps she hadn't made any changes and the paper was exactly the same way it was when I last saw her.

Fortunately, neither of these scenarios was the case. My mentee had taken the things we discussed during the last tutorial to heart and used them to inform her second draft. It was the appropriate length, focused on the write things (the last time she had brought in a second article) and had quotes to support the things she was saying. I was happy that she had done so well, but there were still things for us to work on. The content was good, the organisation wasn't. We spent the bulk of our session going over how she wanted her ideas to flow, and how best to do that. I asked her to summarise the main points of each paragraph; once that was done we went over their order and changed it around until she had them the way she liked them. I think this exercise was really helpful and that she'll be able to use it in the future.

I'm glad we've had this opportunity because I know I've benefited from being able to work with my mentee. I've gotten far more confident in my ability to work with someone on their writing, on both interpersonal and content-based levels.