Prior to arriving at Oberlin I was aware of only a handful of the student resources on campus. There are so many opportunities for students that even after researching Oberlin during the application process, touring twice, and now being on campus for 8 months, I am still learning about the resources available.
When you're applying to college, often your visits to campus are short and filled to the brim with information, which makes it challenging to learn about many of the offices, programs, and support systems that will be available to you once you arrive on campus.
While this is certainly not an exhaustive list of all the resources I’ve used, I wanted to provide brief anecdotes to some of my favorite student support opportunities, many of which were a complete surprise for me when I arrived on campus!
- Center for Student Success. Upon arrival to campus every student gets assigned a success coach who they can meet with whenever they want throughout the year. Success coaches help with planning out your workload for the semester, working on studying tips, as well as planning your class schedule. So far this semester I’ve met with my success coach twice to work on making myself a weekly schedule and to find good studying tips so that I don’t get burnt out. One of my favorite activities we did was color code a calendar with magic markers in order to plan out all of my class, studying, and free time. I mean, who doesn't love a free coloring session that can help you plan out your time more efficiently?
- Peer Tutoring. The Academic Advising Resource Center provides peer tutors to students at absolutely no cost. Peer tutors are students that have done well in the course you are taking and have been hired by Oberlin to help out other students. I have a tutor for Chemistry and Japanese and I find them super helpful! In many ways it’s less intimidating for me to work one-on-one with a tutor as opposed to group tutoring sessions.
- Oberlin Librarians. This one is pretty broad, as there are many different ways librarians on campus can help you. Personally, I’ve utilized our amazing staff of Oberlin librarians for learning how to research. Coming from high school I had very little experience with research, so it was great to have help with both learning tips and tricks for researching as well as how to utilize Oberlin's vast databases to my advantage.
- Center for Learning, Education, and Research in the Sciences (CLEAR). In my opinion one of the best resources on campus is CLEAR, and it definitely lives up to the hype. CLEAR is in charge of providing free drop-in tutoring for STEM classes, peer-led review sessions, as well as events for students taking STEM classes. While I enjoy STEM a lot, I’m definitely not a natural at understanding it, so I've found that frequently utilizing CLEAR resources has been incredibly helpful so far this year!
- Student Health and Wellbeing. Need a flu shot? Want to get some tips on beating academic stress? I’ve used Oberlin’s student health and wellbeing center for both of these and more. While on the outside the center might seem like your typical clinic and counseling office, they actually do so much more than that. From health and safety education, to free wellbeing workshops, you should definitely keep up with what student health is offering each week.
Since this is only a brief list of resources I’ve used so far, I would highly recommend checking out more of Oberlin’s opportunities on our website. Also note that prior to starting classes there will be different orientation programs, open-houses, and newsletters that will help familiarize you with everything Oberlin does to support its students!
The amount of support and opportunities I’ve been able to experience so far on campus has been amazing, and I’m so excited for new students to have the same opportunity. College is really really fun, but there are also some parts that aren’t easy. This being said, by utilizing the resources on campus I’ve been able not not only get help from professionals and peers alike, but I’ve also been able to build a community of support on campus. Not to mention, I’ve also had a lot of fun seeking out different opportunities and experiences!
