Take Charge of Your Own Job Hunt With Tutoring
June 16, 2010 | Christopher G.
"If you carry the two, that will conjugate the verb, allowing the Potassium to bond with Dali's use of color in 'The Persistence of Memory.'"
As a college student, if you want to make it through you have to be sort of a super hero of time management. You have to study, do homework, write papers, prepare for labs or tests, and all while balancing friends, family, extracurriculars…you get the picture. I mean, sure you could just not worry about any of those last few and get A’s or you could stop caring about the first half and fail. Heck, if you’re really good you might even scrape out a passing C. But if you want to have the best of both worlds, you need to be on top of your game.
Well, it just so happens that whether or not you can get a job in a dining hall, a library, or even more unlikely something to do with your major, a lot of people want those skills that you’re picking up along the way. No, not your knowledge of 18th century French Literature or the fossil records of phylum Chordata. They want your study skills.
Usually for their children and not for themselves, but they’re willing to pay you.
Tutoring is a great opportunity for college students, because it’s a field with many diverse benefits and most clients are specifically looking for college-age students to hire. That’s because college students have already learned everything in elementary and high school, but are not so far removed as to have forgotten it all (unlike older tutors or the parents themselves). It’s the same reason that show Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? is so successful (much to my own consternation), i.e. people don’t care about knowledge. They forget the pointless stuff they learned years ago because they just don’t need it. That is, until their own kid needs help. Then they’re stuck outsourcing the job to someone else who knows or can pretend to know really well. That’s where the college student comes in.
Most families I tutor for also make sure that I teach their child study skills, test-taking tips, or tips on focusing. That’s a huge part of the tutoring business, and it’s where your own education is a built-in resume. If you have a good GPA, maybe it’s because of your excellent time management and study skills. Maybe you got a perfect SAT or always did well on standardized tests? Feature your excellent test-taking tips and strategies to get people interested in your services. Even students with less-than-perfect academic records can manage some tutoring if they get creative. Perhaps you were a terrible student, wouldn’t focus, never got interested, and are now turning your academic life around in college. That means you have firsthand experience in helping students with focus or attitude-related school problems.
The other important reason why families like college students is because their only other options are the professional tutors or tutoring companies on one end and the nerdy neighbor in high school on the other. Someone doesn’t have to pay the neighbor as much, but he’s still in high school. A family would get great service with a professional or a company, but they can charge as much as $100 per hour for the more difficult subjects (or the more difficult students). College students are a happy medium. They can be trusted to know elementary and high school material, but they don’t necessarily break the bank. Monetarily it works for both sides, because the college student will make more money tutoring for a family privately than through a company. A company charges the family $60 an hour, sends you out and then gives you $15-$20 for the lesson. Privately, they’re still getting you by paying only $30-$40, but you pocket all the profits. No middle man equals more pay for you and less cost for them.
Are you a tutor? Maybe you’re a terrible teacher and have a funny story about tutoring gone wrong? Tell us your stories; we’d love to hear them.
