The Academic Success and Career Center is hosting live workshops mainly through Zoom to help students who need more support. Workshop topics range from self-care to discussing personal brands and why it matters.

The workshop presentations come from a variety of different departments, ASCC Associate Director Ruth Ryan said. Cougar Health Services is one of the departments that runs workshops through ASCC. The workshops hosted by ASCC are typically created by a reinstatement subcommittee focused on workshops.

For this week, there are workshops about exam strategies and personal brands. To sign up for a workshop, go to the ASCC workshop website, click on the program calendar, click on the workshop and then sign in to RSVP.

Academic coached and advisers create the ASCC workshops. All of the presentations get input from academic advisers while some are reviewed by students, Ryan said. They will get a draft of the workshop, go through it and offer feedback to whoever is working on the presentation.

ASCC does a review process each year to make sure the workshops being offered are relevant, she said. ASCC is looking to see if students are still having issues with a particular workshop topic.

Ricky Thai, WSU graduate student and ASCC academic coach, said he teaches workshops about time management, learning strategies and motivation and procrastination. 

To prepare for the workshops, Thai begins by opening a Google document. From there, he lays out the outlines, reviews the slides and looks at key ideas. He also sometimes thinks of new ways to deliver the workshop topic, so he can adapt to whatever environment he is in.

At this time, most of the workshops are on Zoom. However, workshops are sometimes offered in person, he said. The workshop slides are the same for in-person and virtual workshops. For in-person workshops, worksheets regarding the presentation topic are often provided for students. This becomes significantly more complicated for online workshops, so worksheets are rarely provided. 

During the Zoom workshops, there are approximately 15 to 20 students that attend, Thai said. Those participants are sometimes asked to interact if the presenter asks a question. To answer the question, participants can use the chat box, reaction emojis or unmute their mic and speak.

One of the workshops advertised by ASCC is stress management. In this workshop, the presenters discuss what stress actually is, symptoms of stress and how to manage stress.

After getting into the workshop’s Zoom, the presenter will put a website link in the chat and ask participants to sign in with their student identification number. This allows attendance to be taken so ASCC knows who was there. 

The presenter will also ask participants to fill out a pre-survey and post-survey. These are completely optional surveys, but it helps ASCC better understand how the workshop is helping students and if it can be improved in any way.