While the University is home to many renowned professors, sometimes students need a helping hand to excel in their courses — the Undergraduate Tutorial Center fills that gap.

Barbara Windom, the director of the UTC, said roughly 140 student tutors are currently employed by the center to help others with a variety of subjects.

“UTC provides free academic assistance for many 100 and 200-level math, chemistry and physics classes,” Windom said. “Writing and speaking tutorial assistance for all undergraduates [is also offered] for any writing or speaking need that they have.”

Laura Carroll, a sophomore in middle grades education, is tutoring for her second semester. According to Carroll, her experience last semester taught her helping students learn study habits is just as important as working on the content.

“Just to have two more hours a week concreting the concepts in their minds is probably what helped them the most,” Carroll said.

Jeremy Presson, a senior in chemical engineering who tutors chemistry and physics, has found in his six semesters of experience the review can be beneficial to the tutor as well.

“It definitely keeps me on top of my foundations,” Presson said. “I think that [tutoring has] definitely helped me to refresh on the basics.”

Priyanka Mendiratta, a senior in computer science, joined UTC in her sophomore year.

“I just never wanted to let go of chemistry, calculus and physics, and I like to help people with those,” Mendiratta said. “It was fun. I love it here.”

According to Bradford Wingo, a coordinator of advising in the College of Education’s Student Success and Advising Center, these results make sense.

“In an ideal world you take a class and retain and can recall the information when you need to,” Wingo said. “But in the real world, you’ve heard the phrase ‘if you don’t use it, you lose it.’ That can be true a lot of times, particularly for hardcore math and science. While you may have covered it in the course, if you don’t use it in some while, it is going to be difficult to recall that information or processes.”

Carroll, who is pursuing her degree to become a teacher, also sees benefits to tutoring.

“[My major] is one reason I wanted to be a tutor — to just get better and have practice at explaining things,” Carroll said. “Tutoring helped me learn Calculus I even better because I would be reviewing it with [the students], and explaining it to them and it helped to concrete it in my own mind. It was fun to understand Calc 1 again.”

According to Wingo, he has sent both students to be tutored and teachers in training to UTC to tutor.

“It’s incredibly valuable experience for [teachers in training] to apply their knowledge of the art and science of teaching with their peers,” Wingo said. “I think it’s a great experience.”

In addition to tutoring, UTC offers Supplemental Instruction sessions for large classes of chemistry, according to Windom.

“A trained tutor is an SI leader who sits in on the class with the students, takes notes and does the homework,” Windom said. “Then the SI leader holds three SI sessions each week, which are outside of class, completely voluntary for the students to attend. [The goal is] to help solidify for the students how to work problems and what the concepts mean such that they are able to do their WebAssign [homework] on their own.”

“It’s about making connections between what [students] knew, what the teacher was saying and all these things,” Carroll said.