Academic Support

Seeking help within the Learning Resouce Center was surprisingly refreshing. A big problem I’ve been encountering so far throughout my OSU experience is the assumption that I know how things are supposed to work in terms of formalities, procedures. For example, since I am in Gen Chem II, my professors, TA, and the lab manual itself went in with the expectation that I already know how to write an OSU lab report, this, however, was not true for obvious reasons. Lab notebooks and reports are extremely different from what I am used to back at home and in many ways it is way better than what I used to have to deal with. Nevertheless, the help was necessary and I intensely appreciated it–the fact there is so many people within my reach all working to ensure other students and I are successful is amazing and it makes me happier with my choice with Ohio State every day. I highly doubt us, students could be as successful unless we had each other. I truly believe no matter how smart you are you will reach a point where things do not make sense like they used to, and that’s why there is a library of people at Ohio State willing to step in and help students achieve their goals. In highschool, I truly believe there’s a stigma in receiving help, in fact, being abhorrent to help relies deeply within our post-industrial society, as it makes us appear weak, incapable, failable. These attributions, of course, are silly. Those who seek help only seek to improve themselves. Would you make fun of someone going to the gym to move towards a more healthy lifestyle? Would you make fun of someone going to Drivers ED to learn how to drive? Would you make fun of someone looking up a recipe to figure out how to cook a meal? No, you wouldn’t. No one starts out as superstar athletes, no one starts out as NASCAR drivers, no one starts out a master chef, and no one starts out knowing all the course material. Some things need to be taught, otherwise, we as a society would progress nowhere, we’d be stuck in this depressing Dark Age where people hog their ideas and their concepts for themselves, destroying any possible future questions that can be made on the topics at hand while killing the information at its core. I also have had the fortunate experience of being a tutor myself back in highschool, and although I was proud of the work I was doing, I’m certain its not the type of work I wish to be spending my life doing; this makes me appreciate tutors so much more having the experience of being a tutor myself. All in all, I hope this negative stigma towards tutoring becomes a thing of the past as I’d much rather live in a world where the sharing of knowledge is cherished rather than stigmatized–life is too short for us to be denying others the chance of discovering a whole new world.