Some College Know How – Getting To Know Your Teachers

I hope to offer some insight to an important question facing many college students and more specifically UB college students – “How do I make an impression with my teachers?” Again, I won’t say that I am any kind of expert or even someone who should be giving out advice, but if your interested check it out.

Going to a big school has many advantages such as a large student body, a wide range of majors and minors, very often a sports team to cheer for (not so much in the case of UB) and much more. However, with all of these advantages comes a very significant disadvantage.

A large student body usually results in large class sizes. This can mean a real loss of any significant connection with your Professors, TAs, and even other students. From my own experience, I know that a bad or absent relationship with professors can lead to missing out on a valuable opportunity. What opportunity you may ask? Well to be honest, the opportunity to get better grades.

Building relationships with your teachers as well as your TAs is an invaluable part of getting better grades. Have you ever been late on a paper for a legitimate reason and had your professor not care? Well that may be attributed to the fact that you have never set yourself apart from the other 100 students in your class or the other 300-400 students that may be in your professor’s other classes.

Setting yourself apart can be as simple as sending emails or contributing in class. I have found that teachers are more open to give you the benefit of the doubt if they know who you are. Pretty simple and straight forward if you think about it. However, this little piece of “advice” helped me pass quite a few classes.

If you start emailing your teachers on a weekly basis about anything, this will be a good place to start. Email them about anything from something they said in class or a question about the readings that you are supposed to be doing or even something happening in the news that you think they would be interested in. Furthermore, try to make sure that you make some kind of contribution during every class. Again… anything. It doesn’t matter. The whole plan is to put a name to the face or a face to the name or whatever.

Hopefully as a result of building these relationships with your professors, when you find yourself having to hand in a paper or other assignment late, your teacher will let it slide. Furthermore, the ever important attendance factor becomes less important because you have connected with your teachers on some kind of a personal level. Trust me, build these relationships and you will find those Cs becoming Bs and getting your teachers to give you those few extra points to get that A wont be an issue.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to post a response. Thank you for your interest of UBE, Inc. and UBEntertained.com and I hope you enjoy the site.

Seth Meyerowitz
Founder & CEO
UBE, Inc. & UBEntertained.com
http://www.UBEntertained.com

 

Filed under: College Know How