By Piper Rutherford | Staff Writer
For students looking to add to their resume, applications for becoming a Supplemental Instruction leader are now open for the Spring 2025 semester.
Molly Weaver, student employment specialist, said that the job of an SI Leader pays $10 an hour for 10 hours a week.
“This on-campus job offers students a flexible schedule,” Weaver said. “This is because you are not only teaching during sessions, but you are also assisting students with their courses outside of class and renting our rooms in advance of the sessions.”
In order to be eligible to apply, Weaver said that a student must have previously made an A in the course, have at least a 3.0 GPA and provide letters of recommendation from their professors.
“Historically, this job has only been open to juniors and seniors in the past,” Weaver said. “However, this spring we are making it open to sophomores as well.”
Some of the more popular subjects that SI Leaders teach, Weaver said, are typically associated with STEM and business majors.
“This includes accounting, biology, chemistry, math and physics,” Weaver said. “There is also the outlier of religion.”
One SI Leader for introduction to psychology, Coppell junior Shivan Mishra, said that a typical session that she leads includes a warm-up, going through a posted worksheet and then participating in group activities.
“Within the 90-minute time frame — typically either on Monday and Wednesday nights or Tuesday and Thursday nights — our goal as an SI Leader is to try and reinforce concepts that the students are struggling with,” Mishra said. “So, from my point of view, the benefit of a session is that it allows for students to work independently, while also being able to ask one another, and myself, questions along the way.”
As for how the relationship between an SI Leader and their students differs from that of a professor-student relationship, Mishra said that her role is to be more like the students’ friend and to keep the environment as lighthearted and fun as possible.
“Going off of this friend idea, you do not want to be too intimidating as an SI Leader,” Mishra said. “Instead, you want to cultivate a safe space for students to come to you with questions that they may not feel comfortable asking their own professor.”
The goal of a session is not to re-teach or re-lecture the same material, but to present challenging concepts in a more digestible manner, according to Mishra.
“It is common for a student to be confused about how their professor with a Ph.D. explains a concept,” Mishra said. “But as another college student, I can break the information down into basic terms that an introduction-level student can better grasp.”
Mishra said the rewards of being an SI Leader are endless.
“I love it when I see my students succeed in the course,” Mishra said. “I still see some of my old SI kids, and when we run into each other on campus it is nice to hear about how much they have improved in a certain area of study, or how they have fallen in love with a subject that I once fell in love with too.”
