Located on the second and third floors of the Homer Babbidge Library, the Writing Center and Qualitative Learning Center, or Q Center, are here to help UConn students with their troubles. Whether it’s a tough homework assignment, a concept that a teacher didn’t cover thoroughly or a personal writing project one wants to improve, the Writing and Q Centers are there for you.
The Writing Center
Located on the south side of level two, the Writing center has seven different modalities for students to choose from. This includes 30 and 60-minute in-person appointments, online appointments and AIM (Accountability, Intentional Work, Motivation) sessions. Along with written feedback, there is also an asynchronous option where students can share their writing with tutors and receive written comments afterwards.
AIM sessions are a new support service at the Writing Center, where students can work alongside peer tutors on stressful writing projects. In-person and online tutoring sessions are where students can meet up with tutors for advice on their assignments. You can either drop in to the center for a session or make an appointment online at writingcenter.uconn.edu.
The Writing Center team is made up of undergraduate and graduate tutors. These tutors come from all different majors and backgrounds; some are also multilingual. English Professor Tom Deans serves as the director of the writing center. He hires and mentors the writing tutors.
“We’re more of a talking and learning center than a writing center,”.
Christina Roby, a fifth-semester computer science major who serves as one of the undergraduate writing tutors and as a designer at the Daily Campus, also has the same sentiment about the Writing Center.
“Students come in with their personal projects, their applications for grants and they tell me about their amazing research,” Roby said. “People come in with their teaching plans, and they want to talk about what’s the best way of introducing this topic to a fifth grader… I learn about so many different areas of the world, just by working at the Writing Center.”
Both Roby and Deans also stress that the Writing Center is here to make students into better writers overall, It’s not just for finetuning assignments. Deans shared an old maxim that said, “writing centers are not about producing better writing but about producing better writers.”
One thing students may not know is that the writing center also dabbles in research. Deans shared with me an anecdote about how he helped start a writing center in Uganda, where he and other UConn tutors connected with their Ugandan counterparts to conduct some cultural exchange and mentor the Ugandans on working as a tutor. One UConn tutor, Melissa Masnuraglu, managed to write a research paper on the whole process. You can find out more about the Writing Center’s research here.
The Writing Center is open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. from Monday to Thursday, 10a.m. to 4 p.m. on Fridays and 1 to 8 p.m. on Sundays.
The Qualitative Learning Center
Above the Writing Center on the north side of the third floor, the Q Center boasts 69 undergraduate tutors who can help students in math, chemistry, physics and statistics — you can check on their website for the specific courses they teach. Their main role is to support the in-class learning of students in Q courses.
Tutoring is on a drop-in basis and they advise students to limit their stay to two hours. If you want to see which tutors are available and when, there is a tutoring schedule for students to check out on the Q Center website.
Based on activity, students may be able to receive one on one tutoring if the center isn’t busy. If students do need one-on-one tutoring, the Q Center offers external private tutors that you can find on their website.
The Q Center offers exam review sessions in conjunction with course coordinators when necessary. Especially for final exams for lower-level Q courses in chemistry, math, physics and statistics.
Students can also find study groups through the Q Center, either by contacting instructors who have a sign-up sheet for the study groups or talking to other students in class who are using the center to help create a study group.
One tutor, third-semester electrical engineering major Vedant Karad, believes that more students should come to the Q Center because “The students here have been through that, they know how questions are framed, how to approach them and how to answer them.” He also says that each tutor works hard on making sure students understand concepts, sometimes working together if needed.
The Q Center is open from 1 to 11 p.m. from Mondays through Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Fridays and 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Sundays.