Opportunities often arise when one stops seeking them out. This is true for Kate Mulhollem, the new Writing Center Coordinator at Pace.

Mulhollem wore many hats in her past ranging from being a professional tutor, writing center employee, teacher and advisor. Prior to her arrival at Pace, she was in Plattsburgh, New York working as an assistant director of their learning center. At Plattsburgh, she was responsible for training, supervising and assisting  85 different employees. 

Mulhollem was looking for a new job over the summer, but decided to wait it out another year.

“I thought I could do another year of Plattsburgh to wait for the perfect opportunity, the perfect job, so I stopped looking,” says Mulhollem, “One day, I was scrolling through and I saw this position here at Pace and I thought, you know I better apply or I’ll kick myself later.” 

 Mulhollem revealed that although she did not know much about the university, she knew of the school has a positive reputation. In addition, many of her students at Plattsburgh were applying to graduate school at the university.  Once Mulhollem arrived on campus for an interview and saw the Writing Center, which is located on the first floor of Miller, she knew this was the place she wanted to be.

As the Writing Center Coordinator for the university, she is in charge of making sure the center is providing service to students on campus, at the Law School and online. In addition, she does a majority of the administrative work for the center. She ensures that there is enough scheduling hours available, that student employees are adequately trained and receive their pay on time, as well as making sure that the center works across campus in a variety of disciplines.

Although, Mulhollem has only been at the University for about a month, she has already made changes to the Writing Center. During Midterm weeks, Mulhollem worked with Residential Life and Housing to increase the Sunday satellite hours for the Writing Center. 

For the first time last Sunday, The Writing Center had employees located in Elm Hall, along with Alumni Hall. Mulhollem said the extra location, hours and employees were utilized as the schedule was filled. 

The hope is to continue expanding the hours for The Writing Center and be able to come to where the students are, instead of the students always attending The Writing Center.  

Furthermore, The Writing Center has three new hires, which Mulhollem will be training this coming week, which she hopes will help when it comes to expanding hours that employees are available to work with students. 

In addition, Mulhollem has plans to create late night workshop hours as finals season approaches to help students with their essays, assignments and projects. Her ultimate goal is to create a place where students want to come to get help on their work in a wide variety of classes.

“We want to make sure that although [students] are required, they will come back on their own with other assignments, so we have to make sure that we are creating a space where students feel comfortable and confident enough to talk about their writing,” stated Mulhollem. 

 This includes her desire to collaborate with other departments on campus, such as the psychology and nursing department to help increase their helpfulness to students in departments that differ from English. 

Mulhollem’s interests and passion for working with students stemmed from her father, who is a writer. 

“He used to make me stand behind him when I was in high school and he would look at a really poorly written paper and he would say, ‘You know what is wrong with this sentence? How would you change it?’… I think that’s really where the passion for writing and helping people [came from],” explained Mulhollem. 

Mulhollem is excited to bring her developed passion for writing and combine it with her experiences to help keep The Writing Center on an upward path.

“I bring enthusiasm and excitement for this kind of work. This is essentially the dream job,” Mulhollem said. “I bring a diverse experience, I’ve worked as a professional tutor, but now I can take everything I learned from previous experiences and make sure we have a quality program here.”