Based upon the sociocultural theories of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Bourdieu, Holland et al. and the work of composition scholars such as Welch, Brannon et al., and Bousquet et al., who oppose neoliberal privatization, this qualitative study explores how first-year writing classroom and writing center discourses construct student writer identity. Through case study exploration of two students, two tutors, and one composition instructor, this study investigates how the students negotiated the discourses of the classroom and the writing center in order to be/become college writers. Semistructured transcribed interviews and audio-recorded classroom observation aided by the use of field notes and writing center tutorial audio recordings and transcription were used in data collection. By using critical discourse analysis (Gee, 2005) of the interviews, tutorial sessions, and classroom meetings, this researcher describes how the students', tutors', and teacher's language construct a complex web of meanings that students must negotiate as they learn what it means to be a writer in the institution of school. Students' past histories as writers map the terrain of the tutorial and the classroom, and students often follow prior pathways, reproducing the dominant ideology. However, working to improvise and examine opportunities "outside" of the status quo can be a means to re-vision, renovate, and shift some of the "power, status, and rank" (Holland et al., 1999) found within the hegemonic structures of the corporatized university of schooling and learn alternative ways of being/becoming college writers.