By Megan Loock
Elm Staff Writer
The shift to online learning has perpetuated waves of change across the entire Washington College community. Students, professors, and staff have been plunged into a need to learn beyond traditional academia. The student resource centers have no doubt faced the most change, having been forced to rethink personalized tutoring.
The Writing Center, being one of the more widely used services on campus by students, prides themselves on being able to provide “a peer facilitated session in a setting that encourages conversation, reflection, and revision,” according to their mission statement on the WC website.
The Writing Center will continue holding sessions, but instead of meeting in person they will initiate sessions via Zoom.
Students must make appointments at least two days in advance which means no more last-minute sessions the night before a paper is due, unless you planned it that way.
“The best way to maximize the hour is to know what you want to accomplish beforehand,” senior Writing Center tutor Megan Walsh said.
In tandem with the Zoom calls, the Writing Center is training its tutors to use Zoom functions such as the whiteboard which allows both parties in the conference to interact and record ideas with text or highlighting.
“It also helps to attach a file for us to look at, no matter where you are in the process,” said Walsh.
Unlike the Writing Center, the Quantitative Skills Center will allow appointments to be made without needing to schedule a certain number of days in advance.
The Quantitative Skills Center provides, “help in any course that has a quantitative component. We have students come to us for help from Math, Statistics, Computer Science, Physics, Business, Economics, Chemistry, and Psychology Statistics classes,” according to their page on the WC website.
Both sign up portals can be found on the WC website under “People & Departments” and “Offices.”
While all campus resources rely heavily on student presence on campus, the Help Desk is the most affected.
Despite this, they too have altered their services this semester.
Sophomore Student Supervisor Christian Summers said, “If you live in California there is no way we can fix your computer if there is a physical mechanical problem. But, in some cases we can use a remote-control software to see what is wrong.”
The Help Desk will still be available to provide software downloads and other technical services.
The Help Desk is open from 8:30am to 4:30pm Monday through Friday. You can email helpdesk@washcoll.eduto create a ticket.