By Arthur Wang | Reporter
The Paul L. Foster Success Center’s tutoring center provides students with assistance in passing classes or understanding material they have trouble with.
Melanie Briscoe, tutoring manager for the success center, said in addition to walk-in tutoring, the Success Center also offers appointments, group tutoring and a Youtube channel where videos on four different courses can be found.
Tutors can benefit from the tutoring center as well, whether it’s from improving their own skills to earning experience in teaching. Houston senior Bailey Sloan said she mainly tutors other students in Greek, Latin, and German.
“The basics and stuff is what I normally deal with so it’s always good to review that,” Sloan said. “And I’m gonna be a teacher next year so it’s good practice for me to be able to impart that kind of knowledge on people my age as well.”
Some of the students who work as tutors have even received assistance from the tutoring center themselves. Austin senior Kyle Langston said that the Success Center helped him improve his study skills.
“I almost see it as an obligation,” Langston said. “I think that when I was a freshman and a sophomore I had a lot of trouble in some of my classes, and I would not be the student I am today if it wasn’t for the tutoring center when I was a freshman. And so now that I have a better handle on how to study, things like that, I feel obligated to transition all of that advice that I was given by upperclassmen to the underclassmen now.”
Rowlett senior Preston Hart said he chose to be a tutor due to the ability to form new connections.
“It’s a great work-study job,” Preston said. “You get to review material – which is often relevant to the current material at hand – and meet with people one-on-one and make friends.”
The tutors have all sorts of advice on how to perform better in class, including communicating with professors and classmates to study and assist them and using Baylor’s various resources to further aid in study.
“I think being at Baylor, you have a lot of opportunities that a lot of students don’t have at other schools to help you succeed,” Langston said. “Between the tutoring center, and SIs, and the professors here are really open, so I think that you are putting a lot of that to waste if you’re not taking advantage of all of those opportunities.”
Though they have to balance tutoring on top of regular schoolwork, the tutors at the Success Center have a number of methods to manage their time best, including being flexible and making sure to plan out how to use their time beforehand.
“I would say a lot of it is just practice,” Langston said. “You slowly get better and better at managing your time over the course of four years as a college student, and now I’m at the point where every single semester I’ve added on a little more as I’ve become more efficient when it comes to studying and things like that.”
Sloan, Langston and Hart all said that although tutoring on top of their regular schoolwork required more careful time management than normal, their time at the Success Center has been worthwhile.
“I appreciate having a time where I can either be helping a student and myself – gaining something from that,” Sloan said. “It’s not just a giving thing. I definitely get something out of helping the students and reviewing the material and I really do enjoy it.”
