Campus Highlight: Peer Tutoring

One of my favorite things about Barnard is the support it offers. Not only does Barnard have a great support network amongst students, faculty, and alumni, but Barnard also allows for a lot of academic support. I would be lying if I said that there weren’t times where I felt that I was falling behind on classes because the content was too difficult. I was able to pull myself up by getting help from both my professors and teaching assistants (TAs), as they were all extremely approachable and made themselves readily available to help any students who felt like they needed it. Something I also took advantage of was the peer-to-peer learning system Barnard has in place.

If you’re finding any concepts in any of your courses particularly difficult and need help beyond normal professor or TA office hours, or their office hour times just don’t work for you, you can drop into any of the various help rooms that Barnard has for chemistry, math, computer science, physics, Spanish, and more. These help rooms are staffed by peer tutors who have already taken and succeeded in many of the courses you might need help in. Additionally, you can request an individual or small group peer tutor who will meet with you regularly to help address your needs and go over coursework with you.

I currently work as a tutor in the computer science help room. I have been working as a tutor in the CS help room since the beginning of the academic year. The CS help room is located on the fifth floor of the Milstein Center, in the CS-Math Collaboration Space where both math and CS peer tutors have help rooms. The CS help room has different hours each day, staffed with different tutors knowledgeable about the introductory courses in the computer science department. Intro courses are the most popular reasons why students visit the help room as they begin to learn Java, Python, and C. However, I’ve also had students come to my help room hours that have needed help with assignments related to computer science and coding in upper-level courses or beyond the classroom.

Being a peer tutor, especially in a help room, is different from being a TA for a course. TAs generally focus their teaching on one course and are very knowledgeable about all the assignments in that course and their solutions. Peer tutors in help rooms, on the other hand, never know what exactly a student might need help with when they come to our help room. Because of this, I find myself constantly learning every time I work in the help room, whether I’m helping someone with a technology or framework that I’m not very familiar with or teaching concepts from courses that I took years ago.

I love being a peer tutor, as I love seeing the satisfaction on my tutees’ faces when they finally figure out how to solve a problem they’d been struggling with for days. I also love being able to consistently keep my computer science skills strong by practicing concepts that I’m not regularly working on in my current coursework.

Peer tutoring is a job that you can do as part of your Federal Work-Study or your Barnard College Job, which you can apply for through BarnardWorks. I’ve worked many jobs since starting my time at Barnard, and being a peer tutor is by far one of my favorites.

-Ramisa Murshed