Ep. 7 - Spring Registration & More Resources

Welcome to Episode 6 of the CSUSB Advising Podcast! Winter and Spring registration is right around the corner! Make sure to check your Student Center and clear any holds! 

In this episode, we have:

• Upcoming deadlines and reminders
• Nathan Jones - Director, Writing Center 

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Transcript

Matt Markin  
Welcome to the CSUSB advising podcast. Join us as we bring you the latest advising updates at Cal State San Bernardino. Each episode is specifically made for you the CSUSB students and parents. We provide you advising tips interviews with both CSUSB campus resources and those in academic advising. Sit back and enjoy. Go Yotes. 

Star Wildes  
Hi everyone. Welcome to our podcast. How are you doing, Matt?

Matt Markin  
I'm doing great star. How are you doing this end of October?

Star Wildes  
Doing amazing. My kids are excited about Halloween, and of course, next month already, November and then December of this year has been just flying by.

Matt Markin  
I know it's week 10 now of the semester, things are flying by, and yodi Next month is going to be very important. Winter and Spring registration is coming up really soon. So please, please, please, make sure to check your emails and your MyCoyote Student Center regarding any registration holds on your account, and this could be any type of hold, like an advising hold. Maybe there's still some fees that are owed. Maybe fall semester is your first semester, and you still have to submit your MMR shot record to the health center, but make sure you take care of any hold so that way it doesn't prevent you from registering for the upcoming term. But star, we have a couple dates coming up for winter and spring registration, as well as advising, right?

Star Wildes  
There are some dates we just wanted to kindly remind you, November 2, that is the date that students will be able to register for spring 2021, term and November 9, students will be able to register for winter intersession now this is going to be about a month. So it's going to be December to January. Students will only be able to take up to four units during winter intercession and Matt again, being that the week of the 26th is coyote advising week. Students will have the opportunity to meet with their advisor, come up with a game plan for spring 2021 and winter intersession. And again, gosh, these days are just going by so fast. But I know we have a guest here. We have a special guest for this podcast, and Matt, we're excited right to have our special guest let us know about the writing center, as students will have papers that they'll be able to get help with.

Star Wildes  
Hi everyone, and thank you so much for listening in today, we have a special guest, their director from the Writing Center, Nathan Jones, Nathan has been with CSUSB since 2011 and we're so excited to have him here to let us know about resources and what's available to you during this time. Welcome to our podcast, Nathan.

Nathan Jones  
Thanks for having me. Thank you for being here with us. 

Matt Markin  
Let's go ahead and jump right into these questions. So how would you describe the Writing Center to students? And how can students actually schedule an appointment with the writing center?

Nathan Jones  
Okay, we'll start with the second part, how to schedule an appointment. Easiest way to do that is to just head to Google and type in CSUSB Writing Center. That'll get you to our main page, and on the right side, you'll then see a blue button that says appointments. Click that and that'll take you through to our scheduling web app. We use a web app called WC online. It's not part of the coyote one sign on thing, so you do have to set up your own account with the writing center to make it happen. There's a couple of other services on campus who use the same one, like the writing lab or the tutoring center. So it looks very similar, but you kind of have to set up your own account for each of them, so that can be a little confusing, but yeah, so if you click through on our website to that appointment page, you can also go directly to our scheduling web app, which you can find at csusb.mywconline.com, and once you're there and you've clicked register and set up your account, you just log in and you can see a nice visual representation of all the appointments that we have available. There are white boxes that represent open appointments and blue boxes that represent appointments that are either unavailable or already taken by somebody else. And once you've scheduled an appointment, your little white box will turn gold, so when you log back in, you can see your appointments in gold. I know this is an audio format, but hopefully that's a simple enough description that folks can can find that and and get in there. We're open about 12 hours a day, so we have appointment availability all throughout the day, so you can schedule an appointment at any time. You don't have to call in or send an email or anything to schedule an appointment. You just go to that web app and, you know, three in the morning if you're working on something, you're like, oh, I need help with this. You know, go on schedule an appointment for the next day, and it'll be sitting there already waiting for you. So, so that's how to make an appointment. And how would we describe the Writing Center? Uh, the Writing Center is a sort of dynamic collaborative learning space. It's a peer collaborative learning space. And what that means is we've got a whole bunch of really experienced student writers who have gone through a rigorous four unit course to learn about peer tutoring, to learn about writing and to learn about tutoring in writing. And they're all students. They all have worked for the Writing Center for some time now, right now, we only have a lot of really experienced folks for whatever reason. And yeah, so students make appointments, and what you basically do is bring your writing wherever you are in your writing process. It can be just starting to I'm think I'm done. I just want somebody to make sure it makes sense, kind of thing. So anywhere you are in that process of getting your writing done, you come in and you work with the tutor. So that looks a little bit different for everybody, and it looks a little bit different depending on where you are in your process, but generally, it involves having a great conversation. These days on Zoom, the tutor will read through your stuff with you, ask questions, read your prompt, your assignment sheet, any you know, other information you might have that you're concerned about. Maybe you have a rubric or some kind of grading scheme that your professor has given you you want to make sure you're hitting all your points, or something like that. So, you know, the more sort of information you bring to the session, the more good work the tutor can do to help you contextualize that and then answer your questions and work with you to ask lots of questions and then figure out answers to those questions in sort of a collaborative process where you'll work with the experienced fellow student writer and try to figure out what your priorities are, what your goals are for the writing project that you're working on, and how to move forward with success.

Star Wildes  
That is awesome. And thank you so much for sharing that Nathan, and thank you for explaining the process as we go into this next question. So does the Writing Center only work with students on specific assignments, the type of writing assignments, or projects?

Nathan Jones  
No. So we work with anybody on anything, and also at any stage of your writing process. And you might not believe that, but it is true. We work with some crazy stuff, but most people do come in with you know, your typical writing assignment this quarter, in the fall of 2020, we're seeing a lot of folks coming in from Psych 3311 working on big research papers for that class. So we work with people in Psych help them think through and ask questions and find answers to the things that they're working on. We get a lot of questions about APA, a lot of questions about MLA, and just various citation formats. And so that, you know that'll come from people across the university, all kinds of different departments. So we see people from, you know, from the College of Arts and Letters, certainly for English and for philosophy and for all kinds of, you know, literature and those kinds of things. Lots of first year students coming in with really interesting writing projects in their first year writing course. We work with kinesiology majors who do a lot of writing. We see history majors so pretty much any kind of writing that you're doing for any course, anywhere across the university, if you want to work with a tutor and collaborate and, you know, get a second opinion, you know, have them read through your stuff. And just that process of reading through something with another person, you'll notice things that you didn't notice before as you're reading in your head, you'll, you know, have them ask you questions because they're not as familiar with the assignment or the readings that you're doing that you know, might seem really obvious to you, but didn't come through to them. All kinds of different great things happen in those sessions. And yeah, any kind of writing for any kind of class, and then when you're ready to, you know, fill out a scholarship application or write an essay for a scholarship, we work with students on that. At certain times a year, we tend to see a big rush of students coming in to work on thank you letters for scholarships, which is a big thing, you know, you want to make sure you say thank you on your scholarship letter so you get the next scholarship. In addition to, you know, actually wanting to say thank you for the one you got to. In addition to that, we see a lot of grad school applications. We see some resumes. Sometimes we see people writing, you know, personal statements, whether it's for grad school or other other kind of programs. And we also see just a lot of other interesting and different, unique writing projects. I always joke that, you know, if you need to write a email to your grandma asking for money, we'll help you with that. I don't think anybody's ever taken me up on that specific one, but we've seen people writing things as interesting as like GoFundMe pages. People bring in their own sort of poetry, or, you know, creative writing of various kinds. So we really try to hold true to the any kind of writing at any stage. And you know, even though we say that most of what we do see is, you know, academic work with students working on papers for various classes across the university.

Matt Markin  
Awesome. That's really good to know. Now, a question sometimes we get is, if an instructor makes it mandatory for the student in. Students grade to complete appointments with the writing center. How would a student show proof that they attended?

Nathan Jones  
Yeah, so we have a nice automated system. Is it's 2020 so we've kind of entered the 21st Century, and we send out batches of emails to professors on a regular basis throughout the term. This is the first time we've done it in the semester. So it's a little bit, little bit different schedule, but we generally send out email kind of earlier in the term, and then the middle of the term, and then at the end of the term, and then we send one final email, including all appointments throughout the entire term, cumulative. When we send that on a nice, neat spreadsheet to the professor, so that they can see what's included in that report, is just sort of like an attendance record. So it's got your name, your student ID number, the day you came, what time you came, and that's about it. And we send those organized by class. That makes it nice and easy for the professor to say, Okay, here's all the students who came for this class and when they came. And then we send out a final report at the end of finals week, because we know some students do have big writing projects due in finals week or at the very end of finals week. So we're also open in finals week. And so at the end of finals week, we'll send out a report just covering those appointments in finals week. So that lets us get out that sort of whole term report to professors so that they had a requirement to come during the term. They have that. And then if somebody does come in finals week, they get that as well. So there are some writing centers for transfer students and folks who have experience at other universities. There are writing centers other places who write up reports on what happened in the session and try to, especially at smaller universities where maybe, like, every single freshman has to come for two visits, or something like that, right? They'll actually write up reports to the professor on what you did in the session, or what they think you need to work on, or something like that. That's not how we operate. Your sessions at the Writing Center are kind of confidential. If you don't want a professor to know that you came, if you just want to come and work on stuff, that's cool. If you want to come and work on a GoFundMe page, you know, obviously we're not going to report that to any professor, right? So that's cool too. But if you are in one of those courses, whether it's a, you know, we have professors who are teaching 700 level classes, you know, who really strongly encourage their graduate students working on a PhD or EDD rather, to come in and work collaboratively, collaboratively with one of our Graduate Writing Center you know, writing consultant tutors. You know, any, anybody from any class can, you know, kind of work with us to get that happening. So we're happy to send those reports. But just know that, you know, we don't write your professor. We don't rat on you or rat you out to your professor saying, you know, hey, they need help with this. You know, it's really just an attendance record.

Star Wildes  
Thank you so much for sharing that. Nathan, and it's awesome to know GoFundMe accounts. I know, you know, seeing stories and everything that's amazing that students have the opportunity to work on that with your center. That is amazing. And as we talk about, you know, students making the appointment. Is there anything a student should do as they prepare for their writing center appointment with you and your team?

Nathan Jones  
Yeah, I think one of the important things to do is just, just think about, you know, where you are in your process. Like I said before, whether you're you know, are you know, are you just getting started and you're kind of figuring out how to get started? Are you somewhere in the middle and figuring out, you know, maybe whether this source works well with this source, and are you integrating these sources Well, or are these citations working well? Or are you being clear, you know? Or maybe you're near the end and you're just getting ready to, you know, turn it in, and you just want to make sure it makes sense, and make sure you have a second set of eyes, and you're, maybe you're even in that proofreading phase where you're looking for, you know, a collaborative option to get somebody to help you figure out, you know, what's going on with these sentences. This one sounds weird. You know, I know in my own writing, I always have that one sentence that I rewrite 12 times, and by the time I've done that, I can't read it anymore. It doesn't make any sense to me anymore. And so I got to go to, you know, one of our writing consultants and say, hey, help me read this sentence and make sure it makes sense. And then they read it and, you know, make sure that it's saying what I want it to say. So anywhere, sort of in that process, think about where you are, and think about, you know, what kind of questions that you have, if you really don't know, and you just want to, you know, come in and work with somebody that's great, and we'll figure it out together. But if you, if you do have, if you do have an idea coming in and what you want to do, and you can share that with your tutor, we have an option when you set up an appointment, you know, to list, what are your goals? You know, what is it you want to work on in this session? And that can be helpful for the for the consultant, for the tutor that you work with, because they can then go make sure they have links to resources. Make sure, if you're working on APA, they have that APA handbook right there at hand, which they always have anyway. But still, you know, just making sure that they're prepared for whatever it is that you might have. So you know, as you get ready to come in, make sure you have other things that might help somebody who's not in your class, who doesn't sit there all day, every day, listening to the lectures and everything who you know, they're not going to know exactly what your professor wants. And so if you're concerned about, you know, making sure you meet the assignment criteria, having that assignment sheet, the prompt, you know, the rubric, any other kind of contextualizing information that will help us understand not just what you're writing, but why and what your goals are, and what's sort of expected of you in a class, making sure you have all those things prepared and ready to go is important. And then we do work with students. You know, back in the day before covid, we worked with students in person, and then we also did email appointments, and we worked with folks via zoom. And now we're limited to, of course, just to zoom and email. So you also kind of got to make a determination before you make that appointment, whether you want to work with somebody face to face and have that sort of dynamic conversational interaction, or whether you want to ask for an email appointment. And the email appointments, we try to be as you know, dynamic and awesome as we can. And the tutors will ask a lot of questions and point you to a lot of resources. But there's obviously, because it's you know, you send in your stuff, and we send you a bunch of questions and feedback and comments. There's less of that opportunity for for asking questions, and for, you know, just kind of a back and forth, for the tutor to say, you know, what did you mean by this? And then for you to say, well, I meant this, and then, like, ah, that's not what I got. So let's talk about that. You know, if you just send it in for email feedback, they'll be more like, Okay, I'm not sure if you mean this by this, or if you mean that, and so then, you know, you got to go from there. So the feedback and the style is going to be a little bit different. Some folks don't want to use Zoom, and, you know, maybe you don't want to be on camera, or, you know, maybe you're in a house like me, where you've got, you know, lots of noisy animals or family members or something, you know. So we have that option, zoom or email, but that's another important choice to make, is whether you want to work via zoom or via email.

Matt Markin  
Now the Writing Center, I mean, great resource to use. So the question that will come up too is, well, is this something that is covered in the campus fees for students, or is this an extra fee?

Nathan Jones  
So there's definitely no cost, the cost of the tutors, and, you know, everything like that is covered by the university. This isn't something where, you know, you'd have to sign up for an appointment and pay for it, yeah, this is just a university service. The vast majority of the Writing Center budget, not that, you know, you want to get too far into the weeds, but most of the Writing Center budget is just covered by the university. There is by state funds. So that would mean monies that are coming from the state, or from tuition or from whatever. And then there is also a small portion of the budget, particularly the Graduate Writing Center portion, that's covered by the Student Success initiative. So we do get some funds from the Student Success initiative. So that's a fee that students pay every term. And so you can feel good about paying that fee, knowing if you're going to use resources like the writing center or the Veteran Success Center or other SSI funded centers like that, that if you put that money in every quarter or every semester every term, you're going to get it back out if you, if you make use of those services. But yeah, we don't definitely. Don't take cash, don't take credit cards, don't take favors. We're just a service looking to help students out. No money involved.

Star Wildes  
That's awesome, and thank you so much for sharing that. Now, as you know, we know that we are going virtual next term again. So how has it been with a virtual firm format and our students utilizing the writing center resources?

Nathan Jones  
Yeah, we have a lot of, a lot of students still coming in and still making use of the Writing Center. I think it's hard to know always, you know how people are affected, whether they're affected personally, you know, by the pandemic, whether that's, you know, in a fiscal impact because their jobs are affected, or their family's jobs are affected, or just the, you know, different personalities. You know the difference between being at home versus on campus. Home versus on campus? You know, we definitely see an impact in in who comes in and how they come in and just how everything works, just like everybody's seeing an impact every day in their lives, whether it's obvious or whether it's subtle, right? But I think a lot of classes are are working asynchronously, right? A lot of classes are, you know, not necessarily meeting every single week, and students aren't necessarily getting the same kinds of feedback that they would if you were doing that, you know, the in person courses. So I think that some students are not getting as as much of an urge from their professor to, hey, you know, take advantage of the writing center that they would in person. I know that I have found that everything on Zoom takes longer, right? Every meeting takes longer, and less gets done than you would have just an in person session. So I imagine in classes where where students and professors are trying to get all this great, you know, academic work done, carving out time to, you know, to tell the student, okay, I want everybody to remember they should go to the writing center. They should use the tutoring center. Or, you know, they should make sure that they take advantage of psychological counseling, you know, or whatever it is that's available. I think there's probably a little less time being devoted to those kinds of shout outs. So I think that the great thing about the writing center right now is you can talk to somebody one to one, you know, and really get that direct person to person, feedback and contact time and work on your on your writing, you know, where you know that's obviously not something you're getting a lot of while we're working at a distance. So I think that services like the writing center, the tutoring center, supplemental instruction, right, where you can work one to one or in small groups with other students who are, you know. Really experienced with the kinds of things that you're working on. It's really a, you know, solid gold kind of a resource, you know, getting that, getting that person to person contact. You know, maybe you're sick of, you know, hanging out with the same folks all the time. You're, you know, wherever you're quarantining or maintaining social distance or whatever, you know, see a fresh face. See a new person. Our tutors are really, you know, friendly and awesome, and they're excited to work with people. So we do still see a lot of students coming in, and we see a lot of students, you know, bringing the same kinds of issues and same kind of questions they've always brought, right? Writing is always hard for everybody, you know, I'm the director of the Writing Center, and writing is really hard for me, you know. And when I write anything, I always work with my tutors to say, okay, read this. What do you think? You know? How's this going? So I think whether you feel like you know, you're rockin it in the virtual world. And I think some students are really rockin it, and love this format more than they liked in person. And other people are like, Oh my gosh, I can't wait to get back in person, you know. So wherever you are on that sort of wild journey that we're on. You know, the Writing Center is a space for people to just improve, you know, to work with somebody and to collaborate and to make your writing better. If you're already feeling like you're super confident and you're an awesome writer, maybe you're taking a really challenging course that asks you to write in a different way, and you're just like, oh my gosh, I'm not feeling as confident as I normally do. I want to work with somebody. Or maybe you're just rockin the course because you're on, you know, distance learning time. You just like, bored because you're so awesome, and you're just killing it, and you don't know what to do because you're so cool. Well, that's a great time to be like, Hey, I'm gonna go to the writing center and I'm gonna work with the tutor and just really take my writing even to the next level, right? Because wherever you're at you know, there's very little that's going to be as pervasive in every aspect of your career, post university, than writing, no matter what you're going to do. You know you're going to be having to write reports, you're gonna have to be writing emails. You're gonna have to be writing, writing, writing, writing, writing. And you know, taking your writing to the next level, wherever you feel like you are in your development and your writing journey. You know the Writing Center is a place to be.

Matt Markin  
And just to clarify, is the writing center open for undergraduates and graduate students?

Nathan Jones  
Yeah, so we have a writing center that's open to everybody and their mothers, not really your mothers, unless your mother's a student. And we do have some students whose moms are going to class with them, so you are welcome. But yeah, anybody who's a student is welcome to come into the Writing Center. We also have a Graduate Writing Center. The Graduate Writing Center basically tries to reserve some time to make sure the graduate students have some time available on the writing center schedule, to make sure they don't get out competed by all of the undergrads. And in addition, we make sure that we only have graduate student tutors working in the Graduate Writing Center, and we make sure we have some of our, you know, just longer term, more experienced tutors working in the Graduate Center who maybe are further along in their own graduate programs and just sort of more prepared to work with graduate programs. And Graduate Writing that, you know, tends to be longer, tends to be more in depth, tends to be, you know, more complicated, just by nature of grad school, right? So, so, yeah, grad students are always welcome to come to the Writing Center. They've always been welcome to come to the Writing Center. We just have that time sort of reserved so that they have their own special space. Make sure they don't, especially in crunch times, you know, there's so many students who who do come to the Writing Center, especially when we were in person, you know, we would have a line out the door and down the hall, you know, people waiting to come in, and it's harder for graduate students to to compete with that. So, so yeah, all students, undergrads, grads and including both centers for graduate students. We also, I don't know if you're going to have any staff listen to your podcast, but we also do work with staff. And we also work with faculty. You know, we have faculty members bring in their own writing, you know. So when I say that, you know, writing centers for everybody, no matter where you are in your development, you know, it really is whether you're a faculty member working on, you know, we have faculty members working on publications. We have faculty members working on their own sort of terminal degree. So maybe they already have a masters, and they're already teaching, and they're coming to the grad center, you know, working as they work on a PhD or or something like that. You know, writing in a collaborative way, getting feedback from others, integrating that feedback, ensuring that what you're writing makes sense and is clear and is really connecting with your reader is something that everybody needs to think about on every level. So, so yeah, the writing centers are for absolutely everybody on campus. We even sometimes work with prospective students who are like, Okay, I'm applying. I have a coyote ID, and I need to work on my personal statement. Can I work with you guys? I'm like, sure, you know, yeah. So we, we work with pretty much anybody. We're pretty open. 

Star Wildes  
That is so cool, and thank you so much for sharing that. Nathan, again, you've heard it directly from the director of the Writing Center. Please make sure utilize a resource. And let's say Nathan, if students have more just questions about the writing center or within the writing process, how would they get in touch with the writing center? Phone number? Do you suggest email? What? What would you say?

Nathan Jones  
Yeah, phones are a little little bit crazy in the covid times and. Um, I'm actually the only staff member in the Writing Center, so if I'm, if I man the phones, that would be all I could do, and I wouldn't be able to do anything else. But we do have voicemail set up on our phone, and we hit people back who leave us a voicemail. You know, really fast. You can always send an email writingcenter@csusb.edu and we will jump on that. Our website is a great resource. There's lots and lots and lots of information, FAQs, information about getting ready for an email appointment, getting ready for a zoom appointment, how to set up for a zoom appointment. I think most people are feeling like they're employees of zoom. They're so experienced with it. Now you know they're ready to teach a course on Zoom themselves, but if you have you have you know that's not the case if you haven't had that much experience with it yet, there's great information there about how to get ready for that zoom session. And in addition to that, we have a never ending that's not quite true, but in our normal business operating hours, we have a Zoom meeting that students can drop into, and we have our awesome student receptionist hanging out waiting ready to answer your questions. So if you have trouble getting into your session, if you have questions about setting up an appointment, you know, any kind of writing related, writing center related stuff, if you just have questions about, okay, you know, how do I set up this appointment and what's going on? You know, if you go over to our website, csusb.edu/writing, center, there is on that main page. I don't know if I want to drop, you know, the Zoom numbers right here on the podcast, because then we'll get all of our zoom bombers and spammers, but it is publicly available. You just gotta jump into that, jump onto that website, and it'll, it'll get you there. And pretty much from eight to 8:30 in the morning, when we open for sessions until, you know, 7:30-7:45 when we wrap up our last sessions. But we're open till eight. So if you're start your last session, you know the session won't end till eight. But we have our session just waiting there on Zoom to connect. So we got lots of students dropping it on Zoom. You don't have to show your camera if you don't want to, you know, you can just chat and be like, Hey, what's up? And they'll answer your questions. So I'd say email and that Zoom meeting are two great ways to get a quick answer. If you love the phone, you can drop us a line the writing centers. Number is 909. Obviously, 537, 5232 and we will, you know, get back to you ASAP on that, too.

Matt Markin  
Well, Nathan, we've reached the end of our interview with you, yodes, hopefully you got a lot of great, useful information from this interview with Nathan from the Writing Center. You can do a zoom appointment, email appointment, ask your questions, call them Nathan. 

Nathan Jones  
Thanks for having us.

Matt Markin  
Thank you so much, Nathan, for that information on the writing center and how students can set up an appointment. We truly appreciate it. And also make sure yody is to check out the last episode of the podcast where we talked with David Reyes from the tutoring center, as well as James Graham from supplemental instruction. So one of the things we want to remind you about is spring registration, like star was mentioning earlier in the podcast, is spring registration starts November 2. And to kind of give you a breakdown of when you might be registering for classes, the first group of students will register November 2, and that would be mandated groups, which is students with disabilities, veterans, foster youth, note takers and athletes. November 3 through the fifth would be seniors as well as classified grads. November 6 through the 10th would be juniors as well as classified post baccalaureate students, credential students and second bachelor degree students. November 12 through the 16th would be sophomores. November 17 through the 19th will be freshmen, and November 20 will be unclassified post baccalaureate students. So hopefully that clears some of that up in terms of the registration appointments. But Star, take us away.

Star Wildes  
And thank you again, so much for your time for listening to our podcast. We are so excited as we have upcoming, amazing special guests that will join us for upcoming podcasts. Please don't forget to check us out on our social media platforms, Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, yes. Tiktok at CSUSB, advising all one word, and also on Twitter, CSUSB underscore, advising, we wish you the best and hope you are all well and healthy. Take care. Yodes, you.