CMP Tutoring Session 2

On Saturday we met with the students from the College Mentoring Program again to help them with their college essays.  I worked with the same girl that I had worked with last time and she was very proud about the paper she had completed to bring in to the meeting.  We read through her essay and when we came across a typo, she was very defensive about overlooking it, making it evident through her demeanor that she had put in a great deal of work into her essay.  Her essay was about how her grandmother became very sick and began shaking out of coldness.  Because the girl I was working with is the only one in her family who is able to speak English, she called 911.  She then further discussed in her college essay how she felt she her grandmother be put into the back of the ambulance, riding in the car with her mother to the hospital in a panic, and how nerve-wrecking it was to be in the waiting room as her grandmother was with the doctors.  Once she and her mother were allowed to see her grandmother, they cared for her by being very attentive to her motions and assisting her with her bathroom needs.  The student I was working this defined this moment as the time she realized she wanted to become a nurse.  Once we read through the essay, I talked with her about the experience and how that was an excellent choice to explain her career goals.  The prompt for VCU, the nursing program she is interested in, asked the applicant to explain his or her educational and career goals.  Because she had explained her career goal in her concluding sentences, we discussed how she could incorporate what her education goals were and why, which was to ultimately become a nurse.  Once we figured out how we could incorporate her ideas about becoming a nurse and being the first person in her family to go to college into her career goals, we formed sentences as she noted them at the bottom of her page.  After this exercise, we started from the beginning and tried to combine some of her sentences.  As I read aloud, I noticed that her sentences were short and often began similarly, which tends to be a pet peeve of mine in writing.  We were able to figure out what ideas could be combined into one sentence and also tried to eliminate some words that caused wordiness since we had added more to the end.  I discussed with her the changes that I suggested making before she made any edits to her paper and after she made edits, we reread the sentence aloud.  Her paper definitely improved after working together.  She had just needed someone to help her talk out the connections between her education goals and career goals, which is a primary function of writing consultations.