The Writing Center kicked off the new year with changes, including a remodeled East Campus location, a West Campus office that now includes both undergraduate and graduate students and additional Saturday hours.
The East Campus location in Marshburn Library finished remodeling at the start of the new year. The walls are now painted a tranquil “graham cracker” brown and “downpour” blue, the couches have been replaced with café-style tables, and lighting and other furniture have been changed.
“We moved toward sitting in an L-shape so that students and consultants can look at the paper together so that the students can maintain authority over their work,” Writing Center Director Rebecca Cantor said.
The West Campus location, located in Room 123 in Building One, was previously available only to graduate students. Now it is also open to undergraduate students as well.
Both writing centers have new, additional hours on Saturdays and walk-in hours on Wednesday from 4:00 pm to 9:00 pm on West Campus.
“Because [the West Campus office] was graduate-focused it wasn’t nearly as busy, and [on East Campus] we were so busy that we had 10 or 12 people on the waiting list every day. So we needed another place for us to go and have more appointments filled,” said writing consultant Samantha Kendrick, a junior psychology major.
Cantor said having a location on West Campus is convenient for students who spend most of their time on that side of APU, like those in nursing or education.
The Writing Center offers free in-person meetings with students on any writing project, including essays, papers, dissertations and more. Online consultations are available for graduate, regional center, and non-traditional students.
“It always helps to get another person to look at your paper and [receive] more input, because there’s always something you can improve on your paper,” said freshman music major Rebecca Lester, who has been to The Writing Center once. “And just [having] fresh eyes help a lot. When you’re looking at your paper a billion times for so many hours, you kinda glaze over and you can’t work on it anymore.”
Cantor said, in a response to a growing demand for appointments, both centers are open simultaneously. In the past few months, they hired six new staff writing consultants and eight new peer writing consultants, including a doctoral consultant available online to help doctoral students.
“We are available to help students with any stage of the writing process, so I hope students know that they can come in even before they have anything written. They could just have a prompt from a professor,” Cantor said. “Rather than feeling overwhelmed, students can make an appointment, and we can help them get started. We can help with revision, editing, proofreading, documentation, anything at any stage.”