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Midterm wake-up call

It's time to confront those mid-semester blues

By Josie Klemaier
jklemaie@mscd.edu

Halloween is only a couple of weeks away, the fall colors and temperamental weather are coaxing the masses to the foothills, and Denver is buzzing with baseball, all of which can prove to be dangerous distractions for the midterm grades of Metro students.

“The honeymoon is kind of wearing off,” said Metro’s Writing Center director, Brenda Wright. She agrees that by the middle of the semester, the exhilaration of returning back to school and entering new classes is gone and can be replaced with panic as work begins to pile up.

“One thing we suffer from the most, of course, is procrastination,” Wright said, adding that using services such as the writing center in King Center 310 or the tutoring center in Tivoli 124 regularly and often can be crucial to keeping students on track with their work loads.

“A lot of professors will give a big assignment and they’ll expect behind the scenes that the student will be doing all the work, and most of us, when nobody’s pressuring us, find a lot of other things to do with our time,” Wright said.

Visiting the writing center on a regular basis for short amounts of time can take the pressure off as due dates for papers approach. Students who believe they write better under pressure and can wait until the last minute to write papers can ruin themselves academically, Wright said.

Wright said that though members of the writing center do not proofread papers in the days before they are due, they will help with steps throughout the process. In 20-30 minutes, Wright said, one of the center’s master’s degree professionals will sit with a student to clarify the assignment, initiate the writing process and establish strategies—a lot more than the student would get done themselves in the same amount of time at home.

“In that 30 minutes, you can probably accomplish more with a professional than three hours on your own,” she said. “What I don’t think you have is time to sit and stare at nothing.”

Time management is the biggest issue with students, and probably none feel it more than Metro’s athletes.

“They obviously have to be managing their time well,” Metro women’s volleyball coach Debbie Hendricks said. The athletes have a full schedule between games, practices, training, school and their social life.

“If you can learn to balance that, you’re gaining important life skills, because life is a balancing act,” Hendricks said. The athletics department has strict standards for the athletes, and Hendricks said the preparation required for a sport is parallel to that needed for school.

“If you prepare properly and have studied what you can study and you have good practices, you go into your match knowing you’ve done your best and you’re as prepared as you can be and it lets you play at that level of confidence,” she said.

As the director of Metro’s tutoring center, Eric Dunker believes that the struggle for time organization and prioritizing life’s obligations is not only the key to good grades, but essential for success.

“I have never met one successful adult that didn’t struggle at one point through college,” he said. “The people who persevere through struggle are the ones who can foresee it happening and embrace it.”

The center offers private tutoring that can be arranged at the beginning of the semester, as well as an assortment of drop-in sessions for nearly all of Metro’s lower-division courses. Dunker said that students who go to the tutoring center have, on average, a better GPA than the Metro student population as a whole.

Dunker said a big problem with students is the nonchalant attitude many of them can enter the semester with.

“They kind of slide by the first couple chapters and then they get to something really tough and they didn’t really internalize the basics from the beginning and keep a strong work ethic,” he said. By the time the middle of the semester comes, they are faced with a load of information they did not retain.

“No one should go into a class expecting it to be easy,” he said. “Visualize the entire semester and how you feel that’s going to look like.”

Dunker highly recommends talking individually with a professor during office hours about what they expect throughout the course, which can reflect well when things get tough later in the semester, as well as with students who have taken the course before to get an idea of when the challenges will come. Students should look at their schedule realistically at the beginning of the semester, “visualizing your entire semester and expecting struggle to happen, but taking steps and giving yourself a realistic timeline,” Dunker said.