The Counseling center is offering academic and personal workshops to spread awareness about the center’s presence on campus. Workshop topics range from tips on avoiding procrastination to how to quit smoking.  

The workshops are offered each semester and are geared towards areas where students commonly need assistance.  

According to the Counseling center’s Web site,  the purpose of the workshops is to reach out to students, faculty and staff by providing educational programming on mental health and academic topics of interest to the campus community.

Classes are taught by counselors from the center and there are alternate times and days to attract students. Each class provides the student with an outline of the information covered and contact numbers for the center for follow-up questions.

Some students attend the classes for academic credit or scholarship credit and said the information is repetitive.

Brett Bowers, counselor at the center, said the philosophy of the center is the reason for holding these workshops.

“Our philosophy is to counsel and offer services that are good programs and an effective outreach to get people in here. We want to put the Counseling center on the map,” he said.

Besides the counseling workshops that run through the end of October, the center has focus groups for students with a variety of needs like perfectionism, managing drug and alcohol use, sexual assault survivors and dealing with attention deficit disorder.

Bowers said these groups will be formed once the Counseling center has enough members and he encourages students to go to the center’s Web site to find more information.

“We have the focus groups to provide a social, interactive way for assistance for those that find one-on-one counseling daunting but need people to sign up online for the group to get off the ground,” he said.

The test prep skills workshop emphasizes smart cramming to reach academic success. Other suggestions for studying effectively include going to the library, leaving phones off and logging out of Facebook, as well as taking hourly breaks to prevent overload.

Students in the test prep skills class said they would try these strategies out.

Bowers went so far as to say lots of B’s are better than a few A’s.

“Getting consistent B’s shows someone has the ability to spread time over all subjects instead of focusing on one class only,” he said.

Workshops like test prep skills are open to all students but directed towards freshmen.  

Lots of freshman come to college not knowing how to study, Bowers said.

“Freshman especially need help because time management skills and workload have changed from high school, we’re here to help them figure out how to succeed,” he said.