Seeking Academic Support
Seeking academic help is a proven way to succeed in college and beyond.
When you receive academic help, there is an opportunity to clarify how your efforts are aligned with assignment or project expectations. During lectures and through assignments, professors often make connections across a series of complex ideas which you are expected to take notes on, research further, and understand. Academic support staff can help you clarify if you’ve understood directions, if there is a need for more in-depth research or analysis, and if there are missing parts or gaps in your responses.
Seeking academic help may also improve secondary skills such as goal setting and time management. To effectively manage your course load, it’s important to understand your deliverables as well as scheduling reasonable time to complete them. When you break an assignment down into its component parts you gain a better understanding of the work you need to deliver, what resources you need to gather, and what you are expected to learn. This basic assignment analysis can help you to understand how much time it will take to complete the task, where you can fit it in with your schedule, what materials to gather, and if you need to utilize resources like tutoring.
Before seeking academic help, ask yourself these questions:
- What campus resources exist to support my academic success? What’s preventing me from utilizing TA’s, faculty office hours, or Learning Resource tutors?
- How do I access academic support resources? How do different academic support offices describe their services? How do I make an appointment with the Learning Resource Center or Writing Center? How might I integrate office or tutoring hours into my schedule?
- How do I learn best? What types of tutoring are available? What do I know about writing in different disciplines? What questions can I prepare before a meeting time?