Sure, I'll Be a Tutor! Where Are All the Students?
It's one thing to be a volunteer tutor. It's another thing to lose money tutoring students. If you're not charging anything for tutoring, you shouldn't have to pay to advertise your services. Most student newspapers charge for ads. How else do you get the word out? Try one of these options:
Look for a tutoring board in your Student Union Building. Most of these student buildings have housing and buy/sell listings all over the place. If you ask the people in charge of these listings, they will usually direct you to a billboard where tutors can advertise their services. Sometimes you need to write your ad on an approved advertisement card, provided by those in charge. Write something like this:
Free Tutoring available! I am offering free assistance with introductory Math and Computer Science courses. I can provide help for Math 137, 138, 235, CS 130, 134, 241, 246. Whether you just need help with one assignment or need to review the whole course, give me a call. Call Derek at 555-1234 during office hours (9-5 weekdays), or 555-2345 on off-hours.
Set up a webpage. It can be really easy to create a webpage nowadays since many "free" sites offer webpage builders which do almost all the work for you. Just give your page a title like "Free Tutor at the University of Waterloo!". Offer some info on which courses you have taken and which courses you could tutor. Make sure to put your email address in there (you can put your phone number here as well, if you're comfortable doing this). Then tell me about it! I'll put up an ad on my site and add it to all the search engines for you! If you need any help putting together a webpage, just ask and I'll help you (without doing it all for you, of course :) ).
Talk to your student newspaper. If they're running low on material one week, they may just have some space for you in the "Classifieds" section. Make sure you tell them you don't charge anything, and they will sometimes let you fill in the empty space with a quick ad.
Look for course newsgroups. More and more schools are creating newsgroups for general announcements and information related to the school. It never costs anything to post on these newsgroups, so you can put up an ad whenever you want. Be sure not to keep repeating your ad since this is a very bad practice known as "spamming". Putting up an ad every two or three weeks is usually good enough to get the word out.
Visit the professor for the classes you are willing to tutor. This is an VERY good idea, if you are having problems finding students to tutor. Some professors are too busy to be bothered with you, so leave them alone if they brush you off. Other professors, however, will be very excited by your initiative and will tell the class right away about your offer. Many will write your name and phone number on the board so all the students have access to it. This is a great way to get the word out because you're targetting just the right students and they can't help but find out about you (as long as they attend class on occasion).
Many schools offer different ways of getting advertisements across to students. Talk to people in administration or in the Student Union Building for other sources of free advertising. Keep reminding them that you are not charging anything, so this is not an attempt to receive charity from the school in order to rip students off. You just want to help, and need some assistance to get off the ground.