Becoming a tutor is not that easy as it sounds and especially when you are dealing with college students, it might get a bit away if you don’t have a correct kind of repo and don’t have confidence in what you are teaching them. There must be a good knowledge base when you are dealing with adult college students who might be a little be advance than a normal student from nursery or first grader. Let’s see how you can groom yourself well to become a college tutor.
Find out your area of specialization
You should first scrutinize yourself and find out what subjects you really know well. This will not only help you start your tutoring base, but since you have a strong base in that subject you will also be easily upgrade your skills in that subject. Having specialization is very necessary, especially when you are dealing with adult students of a college. They have chosen that area of subjects because they are also good in that subject and might as well have a strong base in that area so tutoring them without good knowledge and specialization might become a kind of a struggle for you.
To do this you need to be true to yourself. You might think that you are good in math’s, but you might be comfortable teaching trigonometry to an eighth grader, but when it comes to teaching calculus to a college student it might get more difficult. So, you must some subject that you also know well and have at least touched upon in your previous year, so you know where you need to go back and prepare yourself.
Prepare well
Once you have chosen your subject and area of expertise, you should then prepare yourself to teach students. Rather than jumping over first opportunity and tarnishing your image, you should plan well. You should find out the books that are currently working in that subject in most of colleges, and work them out in terms of course structure and problems to prepare yourself well. Then to go an extra step, you should also prepare yourself into the various competitive exams that your students might have to deal with after their graduation.
Because most of the college students know well how to study, but they come for tutoring for that extra expertise and guidance that could help them crack a competition or an exam that would fall right after their graduation. This way you will also develop a niche for yourself in the market in that subject. Tutoring is not an easy task and you also have some responsibility for the success of the student you are trying to deal with. When your initial phase of students will start to get marks then only other students will get attracted towards you. Like every other profession you must deal with this extra friction in initial phases and later it will be all well.
Liaise with tutoring agencies in beginning
Once you have prepared yourself well, rather than starting your own classes you must liaise with Tutoring agencies. This will help you in two ways. One you don’t have to start and fall off right away by starting your own classes. There are several parameters that might be a reason for you fall in tutoring business. Hence, like any other field you must understand this well before you start it on your own. So, by gelling with some tutoring agency, you will get an inside view of how this business is run. Like how they advertise themselves and how the students are. You will also get first hand experience on how to deal with college students and what kind of expectations they have from their teachers.
Then other thing this will help you with is an initial student base. When you are doing your job well, then you will start a follow-up built for you in terms of student base. Students who have faith in you and your teaching skills. Then even if you will leave that agency, they will still come around to get taught well. You will also be able to build an initial repo. And believe me this is so very important especially in tutoring business that you build a good repo amongst the student. If you are good, then agency will advertise themselves by your name and you will get extra promotion that too without any kind of investment. And if you are not doing so well, you will just be known to the batch you are associated with and then you have time to build yourself in the shadow of that agency.
Ask for payments after each session
Another challenge most of tutors’ face is with payments. You must ask for payments either all in advance or else at least ask for payments after each session. For once your month is over, you might face challenges in getting out payments from your students or even if you are working with an agency. They might just throw you away saying you are of no use when it might be not all true and they just want to save some money after using your skills for whole month.
Tutoring college students is not that easy and getting hold of them is also not that easy. You should advertise yourself well when you are looking for tutoring options. The place where you can go to advertise yourself is your local community, then there are various online forums where people who are looking for tuitions and people who are looking for Tutors come. Also, you can advertise banners and small newspaper adds, but that would cost you and you might not like to go that big in initial phase. College students have a lot to rely on their tutors in terms of guidance and help, hence its not only a job with perks, but also a job with lot of responsibilities. If you are able to strike that balance, you will act nothing less than god for these students.
Learn how to effectively market yourself in this article.