Ag Sci to get tutoring center

The No. 1 goal for the Academic Success Center is for students to have a positive experience in all of their tutoring centers. The Academic Success Center has provided different tutoring centers for students for study skills as well as help on difficult subjects. The centers are located all over campus. They cover math, writing, physics, chemistry, speech note taking, and more. Now, the Academic Success Center is slowly working with the Ag Science building to bring a satellite-tutoring center there as well.

The talks started last spring to bring a satellite tutoring center to the Ag Science building because students needed a center over there. The process of creating a center has many steps. “Basically, what we did was first identify a need and once we identified a need, we obviously have to look at the budget and make sure that we can afford one and once that happens, then we try to find space and we have to get equipment, depending on what the help center is, whether we need tutors or something else,” said Academic Success Center Director Jennifer Willis-Rivera. The College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences (CAFES) is identifying which courses that they will need for the tutoring center to cover. Then, the Academic Success Center and CAFES will be looking at potential student manager for the new center.

The new center will expand student employment. The staff for the new center will have a student manager by the end of this fall. The manager will oversee the hiring of tutors, who are students that have been recommended for these positions by professors. The student manager will also oversee the scheduling. “They are going have to be good at working with lots of different kinds of people because they not only have to work with their tutors that are going to be hired, but also they end up generally being one of the tutors as well,” said Willis-Rivera. The manager will also help with getting the word out about the center.

Advertising has been taking place to make sure students know about the center. Willis-Rivera said that they rely a lot on the professors to make sure students know about the center, among other things. “We do have office fairs for all of the incoming students registrations, we have office fairs for College Visit Days,” said Willis-Rivera. The Academic Success Center also provided flyers to display on campus and for the professors to hand out to their students.

“It’s going to be interesting,” said agriculture education major Mariah Ross. “To see how this center is going to work. I know that many students are scared to go to their professors and ask them to explain things. I think it will be easier for students to relate to other students and it will be beneficial for those students in need.”

The Academic Success Center has been looking at other needs that students have and are discussing the potential of other satellite tutoring centers be installed as well. The new center is projected to open in the spring semester of 2012. It will be located in room 326 of the Ag Science building.