Start Smart and Finish Strong

Let’s talk about Texarkana College’s culture of completion.

It begins with Startsmart finish strong.

Orientation is part of that start and we have other key components that to help you be successful to get to that graduation date. We’re so happy that you’re here for orientation, but most importantly we want to see you at graduation.

So let’s talk about 3 elements that TC focuses on. One is faculty advising. After you begin your first session here at Texarkana College your first semester, you will be assigned a faculty advisor and that faculty advisorwill help you create your schedule and your plan to complete. We want to get you here and get you out to graduation as quickly as possible.

The second component is learning frameworks course. You will be in a enrolled in a learning frameworks course and this course is designed to help give you strategies for success in college. It talks about how how you learn as individuals, how we learn, and how our brain works, and gives you tools and skills to help you be successful.

We not only work on that, we talk about career planning. It is very important to have a plan so that again you get here quickly and you graduate quickly.

So let’s talk about a career plan. You need to know what your career might be. You need to know the courses that you need to take to get the appropriate degree for that career. And you not only need to look at the courses here, it takes your gonna college. But you need to look at the courses that you would be taking at your transfer university. If you’re going to transfer.

Or you need to look at your workforce. Information about getting a job if you’re going directly into the workforce. That’s the second component is our learning frameworks course and the third component is an early alert system. We here at Texarkana College take attendance in courses. It’s very important that you attend class to be successful, whether that class is in person or it’s on the web. The information that is given to you during your class is there to help you be successful.

So it’s important that you attend, whether it’s in person or virtually. If you do not attend your courses, you will be notified by someone here at Texarkana College, we call and say hey, what’s going on? How can we help you? Because we know that statistics show for you to be successful in class, you must attend. So that’s the third component.

First one again is faculty advising. The second one is a learning frameworks course, and the third one is an early alert system.

And that’s all part of our culture of completion. One more piece that I want to talk about is the start Smart Center for those of you that registered. In the month of August or later, you were able to meet someone in our Start Smart Center here in the Nelson administration building, but moving forward our Start Smart Center is going to be in the academic Commons and we want you to know as a student here at Texarkana College that you can go to the library slash academic Commons and get any information that you might need.

It’s not just there as a library, it’s not just there for tutoring. It’s there for many, many things to help you. So if you have questions, go ask someone in the academic Commons.