If you wish to apply for a teaching assistantship, which includes opportunities both teaching first-year writing and consulting in the Writing Center, please write a response to the following prompt:
Most graduate students who apply for assistantships in English have no prior teaching experience, and yet all who apply have spent many years in classrooms as students, have observed good teachers (in and/or out of school), and have made observations about themselves as learners. Many have informal teaching/tutoring experience, for example, helping siblings with writing tasks, teaching guitar to a friend, or working with youth groups on scout badges, church endeavors, or sports teams. In these ways, all applicants have a storehouse of experience that informs how they think about teaching and learning.
Please draw on these experiences and any other pertinent background as you explain how you see teaching and/or tutoring fitting into your career as a graduate student and beyond. Your response should help us understand you as a student of English studies and a potential teacher/tutor of college students.
A rough guideline for length is one to two pages, but what you have to say will determine the length of your response. (In other words, longer is not necessarily better, nor is shorter.)
Those who will read your response are English Department faculty who sit on the Graduate Committee.
