The Student Success Center is a new one-stop shop for on-campus resources and aims to save students from the stress of running between math tutoring on South Campus to academic counseling on North Campus to get their questions answered.
This new center, intended to connect students to the various resources at St. Thomas, is still in the early stages of development, but the leaders of the project hope it will allow students to make the most of their time at St. Thomas.
Vice President of Student Affairs Karen Lange and Wendy Wyatt, associate vice provost for undergraduate studies, have been driving the idea of the Student Success Center – a title which is currently a placeholder for a new name they hope to create in the future.
The Student Success Center will potentially use student’s current resources like academic counseling, career development, tutoring, the libraries and more to connect students to different departments around campus. The center will serve as a central resource center that will be able to direct students to the departments and people that can best answer their questions.
“You may go into academic counseling and try to figure out what you want to major in, and that relates so much to career development. So just having those close connections will just be a little bit easier to work cross-functionally with the other departments,” Lange said.
Another important potential aspect of the center will be its virtual connection to the resources. Though they do intend on creating a physical center, a lot of the connections between resources may be done online.
“There’s a really important virtual connection,” Wyatt said. “For example, tutoring is something we envision, at this point, being in large part a virtual connection. So there’s the math tutoring over in the MARC, but we want to make sure that students are getting connected to the MARC through the center.”
By focusing on connecting students to the resources, Lange and Wyatt foresee that the center will make for simpler access to the variety of offered resources.
“We don’t want students to have to navigate multiple systems to figure out where to go. It’s like — there’s no question. You go to the center, and then they’ll help you figure out those connections,” Wyatt said. “We can make that easier for students.”
The idea of the success center originated from research and a report done by a subgroup of a strategic planning task force, and from there, Lange and Wyatt took over in leading the project. All the current ideas about the center are in the drafting phase and could change, but the two leaders continue to take steps to develop the idea.
So far, they have reached out to different departments to discuss how those resources can work together more closely to create the center.
In October, the two will be meeting with workers at the physical plant to plan out the space for the center’s home base. Murray-Herrick Center is a possible location, because many of the resources they would like to connect are already there.
Career and academic counseling may be relocated to this new space. Lange and Wyatt have also proposed that tutoring be a possible addition.
“On first floor, Murray-Herrick Center is academic counseling and the career development center, so those will be the two main offices. So, we’re looking potentially at that space, and we have to determine — do we need to remodel it a little bit to make it more of a combined space?” Lange said. “So we’re still trying to figure those pieces out. We’re really in the preliminary stages.”
Lange said most students use the student resources mainly during their junior and senior years, so the two hope this center will allow students to get involved in the resources earlier in their college careers in order to ensure they are making the most of their time at St. Thomas.
“What I would love to hear is that students are moving their way through their time at St. Thomas and ultimately when they graduate, they just think, ‘I used my time at St. Thomas to it’s fullest advantage,’ because there’s a lot here,” Wyatt said.
Kassie Vivant can be reached at viva0001@stthomas.edu