At university, one of the challenges you may come across is how to get enough support as you try to learn new material on your own. Lectures are helpful for piecing things together, but face time with the professor is something that many students seek out. Here are some ways to get additional face time with your professor.

Go to Office Hours

Perhaps the easiest way to get face time with your professors is to attend their office hours. Most professors will hold office hours for each course they teach. This might happen once a week in their office. You can often find the office hours listed directly on the syllabus, or you could shoot your professor an email to find out when their next office hours are. If you decide to go this route, be sure that you have your questions prepared ahead of time because you may be competing with many other students for the chance to ask questions during the office hours’ session.

Make a Personal Connection

You could also reach out for one on one help with your professor if you aren’t able to get the answers you need during office hours. When there are, many students present to ask questions, it can be hard to focus enough time on the questions you want to explore.

Note that if you are reaching out to your professors for one on one help outside of office hours, it is completely up to them if they want to help; that would probably come out of their personal time or out of hours they were going to spend on other job tasks. So you will need to make your email request personal and have a compelling topic ready to go. Show interest in the professor’s work and explain your question, showing that you have spent time trying to answer the question on your own. If you show that you are a thoughtful and smart student, you may impress your professor enough to make them want to help you outside of office hours.

Attend their Lectures and Events

Your professor might also have some lectures or other events that they lead on campus. If you really want the chance to get closer to your professors, attending their events on campus is a great way to go. You will start to build some face recognition with your professors, which is a good gateway to asking them more questions or getting to know them better in the future. It shows that you have some common interests to talk about if you do have a conversation. When you have a rapport with your professors, it’s easier to ask them questions and get the support you need with your coursework.

Trying Other Resources

If you find that you aren’t getting face time with the professor as much as you’d like, there are still plenty of resources to turn to for additional help. Course hero is a fantastic resource that lets you see notes, test prep materials and other study guides for a wide variety of university courses. And should you need a course hero refund, the course hero refund process is simple enough to make it worth checking out.

Similarly, companies such as Chegg, Pearson, and Tutor.com all offer different self-help programs that will allow you to learn as much as you need. These different programs are useful, but often to understand things at optimal levels, it helps to have actual contact with your professor.

Brock Calderon is recent college graduate with a BA in communications and a minor in English. He is fresh in his writing career and apart from writing he enjoys eating at a new restaurant weekly and exercising to burn off all those excess calories from all those restaurants. If he isn’t writing, eating, or exercising he’s probably watching the most recent episode of whatever show is most popular at the time. Originally from Sacramento California, Brock now resides in Culver City.

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How to Get Face Time With the Professor