Two Ouachita organizations are continuing to aid the students of this university. For all of those new to OBU, the Academic Success Center and the Speer Writing Center staffs will be continuing in their services to the new and old faces alike.
The Academic Success Center began about five years ago. In addition to tutoring services, the ASC also houses the Academic Alert System, success skills workshops and study halls. Among the success skills workshops, a variety of topics are discussed, such as life plans or goal setting.
While it started out small, more and more students learned about the resources available within the Center. The Center currently employs 18 tutors who have been recommended by professors in various schools of study across the campus, providing an interdisciplinary view. Nina Hefner, a senior tutor for the Center, mainly tutors history, while tacking on some help in Bible or English classes. She first became interested in becoming a tutor after attending some sessions for a math class in her freshman year.
According to Hefner, most tutors work one-on-one with students throughout an entire semester. “We look to form a relationship with each individual and learn to work on specific needs,” Hefner said.
Amber Goodrum, student success coordinator and director of the on-campus tutoring service, says she has often seen students show hesitancy in asking for help. There can be a negative stigma attached to the Center’s beginnings in remedial work. However, the Center has since grown to serve a variety of majors, GPAs and classifications.
“There’s nothing wrong with asking for help,” Goodrum said.
Schedules pertaining to small group meetings will be posted throughout the semester in relation to testing times. If interested in a one-on-one meeting with a tutor, fill out the information in the Academic Success Center office located in the first floor of Lile. If interested in becoming a tutor for the Center, recruitment will occur in the spring.
In addition to tutoring assistance with the ASC, the Speer Writing Center offers a number of services to students of all majors and classifications.
According to Professor Jennifer Pittman, coordinator of the Speer Writing Center, the SWC has its origins in a class called “Special Studies,” created several years ago. Faculty soon saw a need for professional communication skills in all areas of study and decided to extend this to students of all classifications and majors.
As Emily Knocke, a senior consultant to the Writing Center, puts it, meetings do not simply consist of grammatical help, but rather consultants often look to the paper as a whole.
“In the first reading,” Knocke said, “we look for overall consistency in the prompt.” She continued by saying that they address common questions regarding sentence structure, switches in voice or simply any missing information from the prompt.
Knocke added that it is advisable that students have some kind of idea of what their work needs improvement on when they meet, but consultants can brainstorm when a beginning is not easily found.
“In addition to simply talking through it, we can help with a rough outline, finding resources and creating bibliographies and citations,” Knocke said.
“Writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” Pittman said. “It’s not just having someone look at your paper and say, ‘Let’s put a comma or period here.’ It’s talking ideas. It’s looking for logic in an argument. It’s looking for opposing viewpoints, helping find a nay-sayer.”
Pittman went on to note that the ultimate goal of the SWC is to promote a comfortable learning environment with the help of peers and fellow students. Being that it is completely student-run, most consultants are English majors, but among them, there can be found a variety of minors, providing a web of interdisciplinary help.
“We are here not just to see better writing,” Pittman said, “but better writers.”
The Speer Writing Center is located directly across from Chick-Fil-A in the Student Center and is open Mondays through Wednesdays from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. It is also open on Thursdays from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Most meetings are approximately 30 minutes and can be scheduled by email at obuspeerwritingcenter@gmail.com or by phone at (870) 245- 5301. Consultations will begin on Tuesday, September 6. If interested in becoming a consultant for SWC, students must fill out the consultant form, which requires the signatures of two professors.
