Yesterday, September 10, I went to something that I had never gone to before, a tutoring session. The tutoring that I went to was done by the MSLC, or Math and Statistics Learning Center. I went because of the impending midterm that I had last night at 8:00 pm. Due to this being my first midterm of college, I wanted to make sure that I would not be blindsided by the exam. I was hoping to tie up loose ends that I had questions about. I did take AP calculus AB in high school; however, I struggled deeply in that class and took AP statistics last year, a math class that felt extremely easy and did not challenge me in any way. Because of this combo of struggling in calculus and practically taking a year off of math, I chose to take Calculus 1151 to begin college. By doing this I have been able to clear up many of the issues I had back in high school, but there is no harm in double checking that you are doing everything right, so I went to work on sample exams at the MSLC.
Right when I walked in I noticed how relaxed of a setting the tutoring area is. It is relatively quiet with many places to sit, which I found surprising because of it being the day of the midterm. I too chose to make sure I quietly did my practice and checked my answers against the answer keys. In order to ask the tutors questions, they have a pole of sorts that you put a card into that says “Place in Stand for Help” as shown in my picture below. Thanks to my previous calculus experience, I only had to ask a couple questions to the tutors that were there. The tutors do a fantastic job of scanning the room for anyone that has their placard in their stand and needs help. Both times I put the placard in the stand I immediately had a tutor walking over to help me. The first question I had was just to make sure I was using absolute value functions properly because I had always used them improperly in the past, luckily this time I was using them properly. My second question was because my carmen stopped loading while I was in the tutoring area because it was in the basement of the building that the 1151 MSLC tutoring is in. Because I could not check the answers to practice exam I was taking, I had to ask the tutors for help, which I felt bad for because it felt more like I was wasting their time than asking actual questions like others probably had. Fortunately they did check my answers though and found that my main concern for the exam would be ensuring that I incorporated limits at each and every stage of the problem. For time, I would usually leave out the limit part of solving the problem but in doing so that makes the solution technically incorrect.
As someone who had never studied before for any of my classes because of laziness or that classes have always come easy to me, having an easily accessible tutoring area that doubles as a quiet studying area will definitely make my odds of studying increase as my classes get harder and harder, I cannot wait to use this resource in the future as I need to in order to better my skills or perhaps even becoming a tutor myself to help others ensure their own academic success.
