By Braedyn Wasden - Peer Tutor
July 18, 2023

It is July 2023; I am in my final semester here at Daytona State College, enrolled in one final class before I move on, like many other of my fellow Quanta Honors students, to Stetson University to finish my bachelor’s degree in English Literature. When I first started at this college, I felt overwhelmingly unsure both about my place here and my place in academics. Like many, my life was thrown in disarray by the COVID-19 pandemic at its ensuing ramifications. At that time I was just graduating high school. As you can imagine, an already big life change was made all the more difficult by the many new hurdles erected by those quickly changing times. So much so, in fact, that I required a gap year between graduating and starting college. This made the process even slower for me. However, I was fortunate enough to learn about the Quanta College through Professor Ben Graydon, and this helped.

Of course I am very grateful for Professor Graydon and his assistance during that time, but I still struggled. I did not have access to many of the financial resources I am granted now, I didn’t have ready access to a computer at home, and since I was paying out-of-pocket for my college experience, I couldn’t exactly afford one either. I had heard about the Writing Center through my then-classmate and embedded tutor Hosanna Folmsbee but I had only really gone there as a place to work on my assignments, utilizing the same computers I still see students using while I work on my own laptop.

That first semester of Quanta was met with a variety of challenges. The first assignments revolved around many skills that I hadn’t practiced in over a year and worked a creative muscle that I had felt atrophy in the seemingly short gap. I had never really felt the need for a tutor before, especially in writing. I had perhaps unearned confidence in my skills, but maybe in desperation, or maybe just because I enjoyed talking about English and writing, I scheduled an appointment anyway.

I won’t name my tutor here because for one they don’t need the advertising and for another, I don’t want to lay all the credit on one individual. It is my opinion that these highly successful tutoring sessions were not simply the culmination of one individual’s many accomplishments, but more the culmination of a particular atmosphere and overall conversation accruing in the Writing Center. Like I’ve said, many of the early assignments in Quanta were creative, and as much as one can read about the different aspects of creativity and how it can be fostered, it is an entirely different beast to cultivate in the real, breathing world.

That was what the Writing Center did for me in those early months and still does now: it cultivated creativity. Not just in the traditional sense, either; I’ve written more essays than short stories, but rather, it was a way of thinking that opened me up to new possibilities of thought that not only improved my own directly creative endeavors but also my thoroughly academic one as well.

This only helped me more when I moved from just a student to a peer tutor.

When I started tutoring I felt pretty comfortable with all the technicalities of the writing process. I knew how to cite, I knew how to format a paper, I knew all the techniques for how to write a thesis, and I knew enough at least to help out the new students. But there was something else that I wanted to grow in my sessions with my fellow students: how to think outside the box. It is an easy thing to ask for. I’ve heard requests like it all my life, but it is another thing to do. It requires practice. Now I've read enough books and articles about creative writing and the creative process that I know “how to be creative.” I know that I should read a lot and write a lot. But that doesn’t do you a lot of good when you’re stuck in a vacuum in your head.

As nice as it would be, we each individually are not the center of the universe, and our experiences are not the perfect culmination of every thought and life lived. We need others to be creative, and even when we read and absorb the experience and insights of another in a story, we are still trapped in our own heads, our own interpretation, and our own avenues of thinking. We can’t get out of it on our own. We need others to really be creative. That’s what drew me to the Writing Center.

Sure, the help I received on citation and essay techniques was enormous, but it was having a space and a chance to explore and grow these creative muscles that I felt that this space was truly unique. It didn’t only help me either — it helped those I tutored as well. It allowed me the resources and the chance to grow in my skills, and to offer new ways of thinking to the students I worked with. It allowed me to really think outside of the box, to find a way to help a student perceive an essay or idea in a new way, and not simply be trapped in the textbook or what has been written a thousand times before. It is my opinion that it is through creative acts and through the creative dialog that one can grow. This must not only be as a student, but as a person. We should cultivate the creative energy of our students in any way we can, allowing something totally unique and beautiful to bloom.