Office hours: It’s that thing listed underneath the professor’s contact information on the syllabus, the thing we all glance at to make a note of, but rarely take advantage of. Meeting a professor during their office hours can be intimidating, but if utilized correctly, it can be a goldmine of a resource. Here are just a few quick tips on how to make the most of your office hour sessions:

1. Don’t go just to go. Set a purpose for your meeting. Be prepared to ask open-ended questions or get clarification on a certain class topic while you’re in front of the professors. Make sure you aren’t asking the kinds of questions that could have been easily answered elsewhere; i.e. Google, a peer, the class syllabus, or the readings.
2. Show up early. By arriving 5 minutes before office hours start, it’ll give you a better chance of meeting with the professor first. This way, you can make sure your questions are answered instead of having to wait around, looking for the best time to interrupt another student.
3. Be honest. Don’t be coy if the professor is talking about something and you don’t quite understand. Admit to it and you’ll get an even better or different explanation. Also, don’t make excuses for your performance or go in attacking the professor. If there are issues academically, professionally, or personally occurring in your life, let your professor know. They are human too and they will understand and work with you to best accommodate or resolve the issue.

For more support on how to make the most of your office hours, come set an appointment with a learning instructor and we will work with you individually to prep you for a meeting with your professor!

Staff writer: Victoria Gill

Final examinations are here and you’ve already read books, notes, and class lecture slides. But how much did you actually retain? What other ways can you study? A great strategy to test your knowledge would be to do a whiteboard activity. This includes having a whiteboard or simply a blank sheet of paper, and writing at the top or the center the main ideas or topics you are to be tested on, then writing down every single piece of information or knowledge you have on the topic. Doing this activity forces you to dig deep, to come face to face with what you do know and more importantly, what you don’t know.

Above, you see an example of how to chunk your studying while implementing this activity.

Let’s say you take a week to study per subject. On the first day of said studying, you can just focus on re-reading notes, lectures, books, and skimming for main ideas. Day 2, you can take active notes on all the reviewing. Day 3 can be focused on trying out practice problems on certain topics you’re weak in and applying the knowledge you’ve learned. On Day 4 you could do the whiteboard activity, and make notes of what you still need to learn and follow that up with Day 5 of actually filling in the gaps of knowledge by reviewing again and doing problems/questions in that needed area.

Happy Studying! Come into Weingarten for more learning or studying strategies!

Staff Writer: Victoria Gill

As educators, we love finding new ways to implement technology and keep things fresh for students.

As technology advances, so do the demands on educators: innovative, marketed content is no longer an innovation. It’s an expectation.

My friends at Weigle Information Commons sent over this article, featuring a How-to book on Infographics from 1914.

You heard me right: an infographic manual from 101 years ago.

A fan of sites like piktochart and canva, I loved reading about the history of these visual pieces which boomed in accord with the news demands around the wars of the 20th century. Like our students, the general public needed clear images and graphs to understand complex ideas around war and production.

It’s hard to believe infographics were actually created when Penn students dressed like this:

Informing and educating through graphics and flashy images is really nothing new and now I can justify the cost of the piktochart professional upgrade with 100 year old data.

All jokes aside, Brighton’s book offers a quick, integral reminder for all technology pioneers of 1914 that I really needed to hear:

“You can’t throw curves… for general use, graphic charts must be simple.”

That’s some 100-year-old wisdom that we can use today.

If our technological experiments in the classroom are simple, the failures and successes will be as well.

Small failures and setbacks have another term among educators—lessons. And small wins add up fast.

The next time I go to create a new infographic for a workshop or meeting, I’ll boil my content down even further.
And I’ll certainly be less likely to take free data visualization software for granted.

This blog post is brought to you in collaboration by:

  

Staff Blogger: Jen Papadakis

It seems like there’s never enough time. Between what we feel we have to do and what we think we should do (to say nothing of what we’d rather be doing) every obligation begins to feel like an enormous time-suck, with everything taking way more time than it should – or maybe, more precisely, everything taking longer than we have. In short, unpleasant.

If you really want to minimize the unpleasantness, you first need to figure out if you have a tendency to treat your time in an open-ended fashion. Why? Because chances are that the more open-ended you are about allocating time for tasks, the more likely you are to fall behind overall.

Perfectionism compounds the unpleasantness. Let’s say that tonight we decide that it’s high time to complete a task and, of course, we plan to spend as much time as it takes to complete the task to absolute perfection, because what’s the point of doing something if it’s not going to be absolutely perfect in the end? Of course, the task winds up taking considerably more time than expected. We also planned to do other tasks tonight as well, so the open-ended perfection of the first task has created a domino effect. We’re falling behind.

Daunted by our continual open-ended, unmitigated perfectionism, we then look for comfort in the arms of outright avoidance. In other words, if we can’t do it to perfection, we won’t do anything at all.

Sound familiar?

If so, try constraining your time. Give yourself a finite amount of time for a particular task. Tell yourself, “I only have an hour to make this as good as I can,” and then get to it. Stop when the hour is up.

The dirty secret about perfection is that not everything needs to be perfect, and often times something just needs to be good enough.

But what if something needs to be perfect?

Then perfect away. But be honest about whether any one task needs the full perfection treatment. And doing something is always better than total avoidance.

Staff Blogger: Pete Kimchuk, Senior Learning Instructor

“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”
~ Mark Twain

Ever gotten back a midterm, peeked at the grade and stuffed it away somewhere dark, never to look at it again?

There are lots of reasons for not confronting the bad exam, not the least being embarrassment – you know, the whole, “But I don’t get grades like this, other people do.” It can come as quite a shock to the system. So hiding that nasty assessment point in a folder or in the back of a notebook is perfectly understandable.

It’s also a missed opportunity.

Let’s face it, basking in the comforting glow of a great exam grade feels all kinds of terrific. Good grades not only confirm our brilliance, but also reassure us that The Plan, in all its glory, is moving along, right on schedule. A bad exam grade can send us into a downward spiral of catastrophic fantasy, where we take this one grade as confirmation not only of our obvious imbecility, but that Dear Old Penn didn’t just make a mistake in accepting us, but should have never even allowed us on that pre-application campus tour. Indulging in this type of logical fallacy may feel cathartic, but it doesn’t solve the problem.

Once again, missed opportunity.

Just remember this: Unless you goose-egged the exam, you did something right, and that’s what we like to call a basis for improvement.

WARNING: Shameless institutional promotion to follow.

The folks at your learning center can help you with all this. We call it Exam Analysis. All you have to do is exhume the offensive exam from its deep, dark hidey-hole of shame and make an appointment with one of our friendly non-judgmental learning instructors. And then? And then together we’ll question the living daylights out of your exam. What questions specifically? There are too many possible questions of a reflective nature to go into, and we simply haven’t the space. We’d have to consider the discipline, the course, the format of the exam, the nature of preparation, the class resources, and so on and so forth.

Staff Blogger: Pete Kimchuk

In this semester-long series, our expert Learning Instructor for International Students Julianne Reynolds offers tips for keeping English “switched on” in your daily life at Penn. If you’re only using English in the classroom, you’re missing out on a lot of learning opportunities. Follow these short and sweet tips to flip the switch to English.

Go to office hours. You can ask questions about the course material, get help with a particular assignment, and build a relationship with an expert. Not only do you benefit by learning more about subject areas that interest you, but you are also demonstrating to your instructor that you care about that subject. And you get more practice speaking English! It’s important to start building these relationships early on in your academic career. Down the road, you might turn to your instructors for career advice.

But don’t just take it from us:

“I visited four professors during office hours a total of 6 times in the past academic year and each time I received tremendous support academically and emotionally. Among these meetings, there was one in particular that meant a lot to me. At the beginning of my master’s program, I talked to one professor about one challenging assignment, as I felt that I could never achieve what he expected us to. To my surprise, he not only explained the requirements in detail but more importantly, relieved me from being overwhelmed by the pressure to be perfect. We ended up discussing our understanding of academic success for graduate study and came to an agreement that what mattered most was the knowledge and experience we could take away with us for years rather than GPA. That meeting was a turning point for me, as I was able to actually enjoy learning and experiencing my study life without the burden of becoming a 4.0 student.”

– Yue Shi, Counseling and Mental Health Services, GSE `15.

In this semester-long series, our expert Learning Instructor for International Students Julianne Reynolds offers tips for keeping English “switched on” in your daily life at Penn. If you’re only using English in the classroom, you’re missing out on a lot of learning opportunities. Follow these short and sweet tips to flip the switch to English.

Get to know the other students in your classes, especially ones who aren’t native speakers of your first language. One way to do this is to get to class early and make small talk with someone sitting next to you. Good topics for small talk include difficult assignments, the weather (seriously – especially if there’s a storm brewing), and current events on campus.

But don’t just take it from us:

“Small talk is a relatively easy way to start a conversation with others and doing it more often will gradually build up your confidence. However, one important thing to keep in mind is to try not to think of the person you are talking with as a tool for practicing English. Friendship is cultivated by a genuine mutual interest in each other, so try not to pretend to be someone else and talk about things that you literally have no interest in. Be yourself and try to talk with people you want to get to know more. Also, don’t be afraid to ask if other people say something you don’t understand. People usually understand that you are not a native speaker and are usually happy to teach you (and you need to acknowledge to yourself that you have a lot to learn!). You can also ask people to correct you if they found that you’ve made a language mistake.”– Amelie Chang, Professional Counseling and Mental Health Services, GSE, `16.

In this semester-long series, our expert Learning Instructor for International Students Julianne Reynolds offers tips for keeping English “switched on” in your daily life at Penn. If you’re only using English in the classroom, you’re missing out on a lot of learning opportunities. Follow these short and sweet tips to flip the switch to English.

Seek out university clubs or groups where you share a common interest with other members. Check out the Office of Student Affairs’ website for a complete list of student organizations and budget time into your schedule to attend regular meetings. You might also be interested in attending social events sponsored by student groups or your academic department or school. When you go to these events, go by yourself or with one other person. If you go in a large group, you’re more likely to stay with your group and less likely to mingle with new people.

But don’t just take it from us:

“When first moving to the US to study, I never actually thought that the language would be a major hindrance. After all, I have been studying English since I was 3, and all of the books I used for my undergrad were in English due to the lack of translations. But what I found out is that even though I did OK in class, it was much more difficult to accurately communicate in everyday situations: having lunch with your classmates, etc. It was in those moments that it was more difficult for me to find the words I needed to convey my ideas. I decided, then, to look for activities that would involve meeting people outside of those that speak my own language. I signed up for intercultural programs such as ILP (Intercultural Leadership Program) and Intercultural Buddies at GSC and started organizing activities with my U.S. classmates, like going out for dinner. After all, if I wanted to be surrounded by people from my own country, I would have stayed home. It’s so rewarding when you are able to speak to anyone right from the top of your mind. It takes time, and above all, it takes practice, but it’s totally worth it.” – Fernando Gama, Electrical and Systems Engineering, SEAS ’20.

“In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”
~ Eric Hoffer

I have an admission: I’m a quote collector. I pick them up everywhere – from reading, of course, but I get them from song lyrics and movies, too. Something catches my eye or my ear and then it’s a short trip into a notebook. As a result there’s no real order or context to these entries, which leads to some interesting juxtapositions. Another quote I came across while looking for the one above is Agent Smith’s long speech in THE MATRIX, you know the one, about how humans aren’t actually mammals but a virus, the one that ends with Smith telling an almost-broken Morpheus, “human beings are a disease…and we are the cure.” Great stuff, that. But not for today’s Blog.

Hoffer’s an interesting writer when it comes to talking about learning. An autodidact, his official biography says that as a child he went blind for several years, only to have his sight return and with it a profound hunger for reading. Temperamentally unwilling to work indoors, he left the Brooklyn tenements and went west, spending the Great Depression as a migrant farm worker. Hoffer kept reading. He hopped freight trains in California looking for work, and when a job landed him in a new town, he promptly took out a library card, which was what they called Google back in the day. He wrote during down time. Eventually he wound up working the San Francisco docks. He started publishing in the early ‘50s, which in time lead to a gig as a “research professor” at UC Berkley, and becoming known ever after as “the longshoreman philosopher”. It all sounds wonderfully romantic until you’ve actually done the kind of back breaking manual labor Hoffer did.

The quote is akin to the idea that the purpose of an education isn’t learning what to think, but how to think, and that learning isn’t an end, but a means.

Anyway, I always liked this epigram, in spite of the semicolon.

Staff Blogger: Pete Kimchuk

In this semester-long series, our expert Learning Instructor for International Students Julianne Reynolds offers tips for keeping English “switched on” in your daily life at Penn. If you’re only using English in the classroom, you’re missing out on a lot of learning opportunities. Follow these short and sweet tips to flip the switch to English.

In September, Weingarten Learning Resources will host a series called Academics Plus for international students who would like to learn more about proven study strategies that work in U.S. classrooms. These hour and a half workshops are an ideal space to discuss academic, language, and cultural topics with the facilitators and with other international students who have similar concerns.

Since the workshops are open to students from all 12 Penn schools, this is a great way to meet people from other academic disciplines and backgrounds.

But don’t just take it from us:

“I found talking to learning specialists very useful in fitting into the academic and social life at Penn. Also, sharing experiences with other international students gave me the sense that I’m not alone in feeling all these pressures and hardships. These workshops helped me build my confidence, so that I can better figure out my own way of study.” – Saier Wang, Social Policy, SP2 ’16

“I participated in two Academic Plus workshops at Weingarten in the past year, one for reading strategies and the other for student conduct. Both workshops were very interactive and practical. For the reading workshop with 30+ participants, we were randomly assigned to 4-5 groups, and were asked to read an article before the instructor started the seminar, and to redo the reading after the strategies were introduced. That task enabled us to immediately apply new skills and see the effect. For the student conduct workshop, we were given some really tricky scenarios and were asked to decide whether or not the behaviors in the scenarios were plagiarism. Before the workshop, I thought I knew what cheating and plagiarism were for sure, but after that, I realized that there were some grey areas that I, as an international student, had misunderstandings in. I felt fortunate that I went to both workshops, as they helped to improve my efficiency and ensured that I was on the right track in an unfamiliar campus culture.”  -Yue Shi, Counseling and Mental Health Services, GSE ‘15

Spaces fill quickly! Click below to reserve your spot in the Academics Plus workshops today!: