I have always liked helping people out in life and I have always been fairly good at school, so when I had the chance to combine those things I took it. At the beginning of my junior year in college I was approached about tutoring Organic Chemistry. I had just finished taking Organic Chemistry the previous year, so it was fresh in my mind but it was also a hard course. I was a little worried about tutoring the subject because I barely understood the subject in its entirety myself but I took a chance and accepted the tutoring position at my school. It turned out I knew a lot more about Organic Chemistry than I thought I did and I was able to help out other students that didn't understand it.

I'm still tutoring now at my school but I've added a few more subjects to the list that I can tutor. I currently tutor almost all of the Chemistry courses, all of the Mathematics courses, a few Accounting courses, and a Biology course at my school. The addition of these subjects has made me a very diverse tutor and one of the more requested tutors because I have the ability to tutor more than one subject. With all of this being said, I have learned a lot about myself and a lot about others through this job.

I've learned that I do in fact like helping others learn, and I like to give people another way to solve a problem. Its very satisfying to see someone you have helped in a subject finally understand it for themselves. It gives you validation that you do know what you're talking about and that you are capable of sharing your knowledge with others. Yet, I've also learned that I do not remember everything I have learned in every course I've taken and that it is OK. Its OK to not have all of the answers and its okay to figure out the solution to a problem with the person you're tutoring.

I've also learned some things about the people that I've tutored in the past and those that I'm currently tutoring. One thing I've learned is that everyone learns at their own pace and sometimes you have to go over the same concept multiple times before they will understand and sometimes you can go over the concept one time and it will click. However long it takes someone to learn a concept is OK and its going to be different for everyone so you have to be patient, even when you think you can't be.

That brings me to my next point, sometimes tutoring a subject you think is extremely easy to someone who is struggling in the subject can be frustrating. You constantly wonder why they aren't understanding the subject because it is so easy to you, but you have to understand that something you find easy may be the hardest thing for someone else. I've encounter this fact several times over the past two years and I've had to hold in my frustration because you can't show it to the person you're trying to help. I know it can be hard sometimes to hold back your tongue when you want to scream or yell at someone after they haven't gotten the concept down after the hundredth time but you again have to understand that everyone understands things in different ways and in different times. This is something that I think I knew before going into tutoring but didn't completely understand until I started tutoring and experienced it first hand.

I'm in no way saying that it is bad to take longer to learn something, I'm just saying that I didn't completely understand that people learned differently before starting this journey. I think this has to be one of the most beneficial things I've learned through this job and I think it is something that has brought me back to the same job year after year.