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Writer's pictureCourtney Luna

How I became a tutor

Updated: Jul 29, 2023




I’ve always known what I wanted to be when I grew up. Since I was four years old, I’ve wanted to become a novelist. My favorite genre is historical fiction, and I want to write it to inspire other people to follow their dreams by learning lessons from the brave heroes and actions of the past.

Nevertheless, the path to becoming a novelist is not an easy one. Certainly, it doesn’t take the wave of a magic wand to get a book published, let alone marketed, read, and sold. Thus, I knew that I would need to work some kind of day job, perhaps for years, before I broke into the writing market and could write novels full-time.

When I was a college student, I decided to study English-Writing so that I could improve my writing skills and hopefully accomplish my dreams faster. As well as the more traditional English courses, I took many professional writing courses so that I could easily transfer my skills to technical writing, journalism, social media marketing, etc. I also minored in history so that I could have more expertise and research experience to draw from when I wrote historical fiction.

I am always grateful for my time in college and don’t regret what I chose to study. Still, the path to finding my “in-the-meantime” calling wasn’t easy. I interviewed for several positions but never found a job that was a good fit, hired me, or both. As a result, I remained jobless for several months after graduation.

One morning while waiting for my coffee at Starbucks, I desperately asked the manager if she was hiring: I needed to start paying back my student loans! Thankfully, she was, and I settled into a transitory, not-where-I-wanted-to-be-but-I-could-do-with-it-for-now, career as a barista.

I plugged away at learning the ins-and-outs of my job while continuing to write in my spare time. I ended up falling in love with being a barista and became so good at the job, that, one and a half years after I started, I sought out and obtained a supervisory role. Unfortunately, due to various circumstances, the position that I thought would become my full-time job did not end up being a good fit for me. I felt like my world was in shambles, and I went back to what I thought was “square one” as a regular barista.

However, throughout all this time, I had been working several side jobs as a tutor. And the itch to pursue tutoring on a more regular basis would not go away. I began tutoring my peers in college when they would have trouble completing their essays and needed advice. I didn’t even realize I was tutoring at the time; I was just happy to help out my friends. But this soon became a passion to teach, instruct, and watch young minds flourish when they finally “got it.”

The first tutoring student I ever had, I will never forget. She was a fellow classmate, an adult student, and she was majoring in English, but her first language was Spanish. As a result, she was unfamiliar with English grammar rules and couldn’t remember ever being taught the steps of the writing process. Thus, I walked her through these concepts and saw incredible progress. At the end of her senior year when we both graduated, my classmate even won our school’s Matthew Richards Prize in English! I was so proud of her. And that feeling of watching another person succeed because you had something to offer them was like no other. I knew I wanted to pursue this way of helping people long-term.

So I did. After wondering what purpose my having great grades and study habits had, I realized that I could continue to pass my knowledge on to others. So I wrote on some local homeschool groups’ Facebook pages and offered my tutoring services. And I began to get students!

I was thrilled. I decided I would give each of my students a learning style quiz during our first session together to help us both understand how the student learned information best, why certain study methods they had previously used had been ineffective, and what they could do, instead. I also take the time to get to know my students’ likes and dislikes, their hobbies, and more.

Giving my students learning style quizzes and finding out what they enjoy (and don’t) has been invaluable. I use this information to combine both my students’ learning styles and interests into how I approach tutoring particular subjects with them. For example, if a student is a visual learner but has a hard time remembering certain historical events, I’ll have them draw colorful diagrams explaining the events. Or if they are an auditory learner, I’ll have them read assignments out loud and possibly record themselves explaining key concepts so they can listen to them again later. This is a philosophy which has proven successful and one of which I am proud.

Truly, my dream is my company’s mission statement: to help today’s students develop and achieve their educational and pre-professional goals so they are better equipped to make a unique impact upon the world while following their dreams. And I can do this both by tutoring and eventually writing novels.

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and message me! My passion is to inspire and motivate students, driving them to be their best. I look forward to meeting you!


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