School got you feeling down? Let academic coaching pick you up!

PVCC offers immense amounts of support for its students during their time at the college. One of the many great support systems PVCC has in place is academic coaching. Academic coaching is meeting up with a tutor at PVCC to help students create a plan for how they can improve their skills for academic success. 

Academic coaching finds its home in the Writing Center, in hallway 600. It is open Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Friday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. The advisers students are able to meet with are James Bryant, Todd Parks, Emily Kingsley, and Ruth Yoder. Students can find specific information about tutors’ emails at https://www.pvcc.edu/academic-coaching.

Meetings can be set up in-person at the Writing Center, on Zoom, or by going to Navigate on your myPVCC dashboard. They can be as short as 20 minutes or as long as 45 minutes, depending on what help students need. 

The academic coaches are there to help with a variety of skills to help better students’ academic achievement. A common misconception with academic coaching is that people often confuse it with academic advising. Advising is there to help students pick classes, while the coaching is not just focused on one specific class but rather gives students skills to use in all of their classes in order to succeed. Skills they like to focus on are time management and note-taking, while also helping fix problems like procrastination and testing anxiety. 

Appointments will usually start with discussing the issues at hand, so the coach is able to get an idea of what skills students need to work on, and what things in their schedule need to change in order to be successful. Students come up with a plan with their coach and then usually book an appointment for a week later, to check back in and see what worked, and what needs a bit of tweaking in order to fit their needs. Coaches will usually help students build a routine in order to keep these skills in place so they become habits. The meetings also serve to keep students accountable for their work with help from their coach. It lets students meet with faculty at PVCC to make new connections, but also holds them accountable for their academic success. 

I sat down with Ruth Yoder, one of the academic coaches here at PVCC. Yoder works in the Writing Center as a writing tutor and an academic coach and also helps with freshman orientation for incoming students. She brought an interesting perspective to the process. She brought up the fact that all of your favorite celebrities have a support system very similar to this in order to keep themselves successful and on task with everything going on in their busy lives. Just like us, they are not able to do everything by themselves; they need help. Yoder said, “The most successful people are the people that get help when they need it.”