The Ike and Letty Evans Academic Success Center provides engineering students with the tools they need to achieve their academic goals
Transitioning from enrollment to graduation can be a struggle for most students. Learning to navigate a new class load, a new environment and social life can be a difficult task.
The Ike and Letty Evans Academic Success Center was created with the help of donors to bridge the gap in academics and create a more inclusive and welcoming engineering program for all students.
The objective of the Academic Success Center is to partner with students to address their individual needs and unique goals in their academic career. The center was built to provide a way for students to get one-stop access to tutoring, mentoring and diverse support programs, which emphasize intellectual curiosity and build the skills students need to manage their lives outside of the university and throughout their professional lives.
Anna Kleibohmer, a recent graduate in the Carl R. Ice College of Engineering, decided she needed tutoring after her first chemistry exam. She said that she “knew tutoring had the potential to positively impact my less-than-stellar academic performance and — at the time — nearly non-existent social life.”
Tutoring and other services within the Academic Success Center are not just about getting the help students need, but are more geared toward providing tools to succeed for the long-term. Most students who enter the Academic Success Center leave with skills that enable them to thrive in the classroom without the help of a tutor.
Anna states that “the faculty and staff are dedicated to assisting students with their academic needs, the workers are committed to providing excellent services, and the students who are seeking the help always have a great attitude and a willingness to learn.”
The center creates a welcoming and supportive environment for all students. “They never made me feel like my questions were stupid; they only helped me to think for myself,” Anna said.
The environment was a big factor in Anna’s return to the center, but it was the friendships and support she felt that really brought her back again and again.
“The study groups and friends I made at Scholars Assisting Scholars were relationships that extended outside of school and the classroom,” Anna said. The relationships students build among themselves and their tutors, as well as with their peers and coworkers, are invaluable to their success academically and professionally.
Anna is now a management trainee for BNSF Railway. While she does not always use everything she learned in the classroom, she said that it is the interpersonal skills and intangibles that really help her in her day-to-day professional life. “Knowing how to talk and interact with people from different backgrounds is incredibly important,” Anna said.
The Academic Success Center taught Anna that everyone knows something and that everyone has something to offer; valuing another person’s background and knowledge base goes a long way in the professional, and the collegiate world.
“K-State — and the College of Engineering specifically — offers a number of resources that enable students to be successful both in and out of the classroom; you just have to be confident enough to seek out the opportunities,” Anna said.
The College of Engineering, with the help of donors Ike and Letty Evans, has made the Academic Success Center easily accessible to students who are willing to work and wanting to make their college and future professional careers the best they can be.
The Academic Success Center offers in-depth help for those seeking it, including the Scholars Assisting Scholars Tutoring program, the General Engineering Program, Women in Engineering, the Multicultural Engineering Program, Kansas Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, Engineering Pathways and Student Services.
For more information about the services offered in the Ike and Letty Evans Academic Success Center, click here.
