November 5-9

      This week was incredibly busy with every one of my appointments filled, and plenty of walk-ins to fill in if I managed to wrap up a session quickly. There are three major things I want to discuss this time: scheduling miscalculations, the student that knew too much, and consultant's fatigue. 
      Starting simply, as soon as I started my shift at 1:00 PM on Monday, I had two students who claimed to have an appointment with me - one was a new student with a technical business paper on AI, the other was a returning student that I had seen twice before. The matter created some confusion for me, which I resolved as best I could and things did end amiably, but I thought it worth mentioning. I had checked my appointments that morning, but only knew that I had an appointment at 1:00; I didn't know who it was with. Regardless, I ascertained who could wait and who couldn't and handled things in a timely fashion.
       Skipping forward through a session or two that same day, I saw to a Freshman walk-in that had two complex papers, both demonstrating an advanced writing style than what I have seen other Freshman bring me. Our session, as a result of me not having any other appointments for that day, nor noticing any further walk-ins, lasted somewhere between an hour to an hour and a half. During this time, while I was impressed with the student's advanced writing capabilities, I managed to find several issues worth pointing out. These issues took two primary forms: a lack of being concise, and too much unexplained professional vocabulary. Their paper was riddled with giant, page long, or more, paragraphs that I recommended be broken down into several paragraphs, at least so as to not lose the reader. As for their vocabulary, I recommended that she explain many of the terms and phrases they were using because while they might know what it means, an average reader might not. This advice was more relevant for the English paper they showed me as opposed to the more specific race and gender norms paper. They seemed reluctant to this idea, thinking that these things were "common knowledge" until I explained my own confusion at much of the terminology.
       With all that discussed, I'll get on to my last point, that of consultant fatigue. I'll try to keep this point short, but the general idea is that with so many students coming in so suddenly, another sitting down just as you're waving goodbye to the last, it's a real challenge as a consultant to keep your level of enthusiasm and insight at its best. Speaking for myself, I start off a typical session by asking what the student wants to find in their paper, if they have any specific issues with it, and then requesting to read it aloud. This allows the student to listen for those issues they wanted to correct. However, after a certain point, I've noticed that my mouth gets dry, I start making reading mistakes, etc. I suggested a change to a student's paper at one point that I had to embarrassingly rescind and apologize for. Their sentence was fine, I had just misread it completely due to reading fatigue. Overall, this is just another challenge for me to overcome - start bringing a water bottle, read quieter and faster while focusing on points of interest that matter, and more of the same. Things are gonna get busier before they get slower. 

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