Becoming a student leader can mean a lot of things depending on the university that you’re at and the specific program that you get into. Are you teaching? Doing research? Something in between? In the case of my position, as the UCWbLing student leader, it means that I’m able to split my time between tutoring and overseeing how well UCWbLing itself is doing. Although I haven’t quite jumped into the deep end of what all this will mean for me in the future, I do know what it means for me now: growth.
Before Student Leadership
Before this role, I’ve been interested in the possibilities for content management, strategy, and overall how different websites managed to make their online appearance seem so effortless. Although a writing center may not seem like the first place one would turn to investigate this avenue of professional and personal development, it became a place that fostered my investigation. This past summer quarter I was able to continue working remotely, tutoring people who both had summer classes and those who simply needed our serves outside of the traditional school year. In my down time I partnered with the previous student leader of UCWbLing as we investigated some changes that might be made to the site, how we could make resources that would benefit all students, and where content strategy fit into all of this.
While this started as a hope that we would simply create a style guide for blog student leaders to refer to when reviewing students’ writing, it soon turned into something more. Robert R. and I, at the end of our journey, found ourselves setting up meetings with three different university writing centers, talking with their administrators and seeing what they did to encourage engagement. Thus, a journey into style guides — which had started as a simple summer project — turned into a chance for me to realize what being the blog student leader could mean for me. Now, I’m entrusted with asking tutors to submit various blog posts, to review them, and to consider how they all fit into the categories we have here. As the draw to the UCWbL, for me, has always been the people, the tutors, students, and the staff who support us do all we do, I’m able to be here to help facilitate the process in getting their voices heard.
The Future of Student Leadership
In addition to the human aspect of this position, I’m excited to see what role I can play in terms of website and content development, ensuring that UCWbLing is accessible to the most number of people and allows valuable pieces to be read by those they matter to. This, of course, means getting familiar with WordPress, a platform which I’ve previously had a rather neutral background with. I’ve tried to make a site on it before, but amidst its various capabilities and nuance, I found that it wasn’t suited for what I was looking for at the moment. Moving forward and learning about the basics of creating pages, navigating it, and understanding how it all works, however, has been a process that I’m grateful to have been a part of.
In particular, I appreciate how I now feel equipped to begin working with other tutors, supporting their posts, and ensuring that there is balance among all the categories that UCWbLing houses. Taking a crash course in WordPress, catching up with Matthew P., and reflecting on my work from this previous summer, I feel that it’s all prepared me to be able to take on more and more as the quarters continue, to give it my all to help this blog reach those it can help the most.