Fostering a culture of care and belonging by providing meaningful academic support and engagement.
Overview of Services:
The Academic Success Center (ASC) empowers students to strengthen academic skills, build confidence, and navigate academic challenges as they progress toward their educational goals through personalized, scaffolded support. Accessible support options are designed to meet varied learning preferences, schedules, and student needs. Students may engage in scheduled coaching through multiple formats, including synchronous one-on-one coaching, interactive small-group sessions, and asynchronous recorded coaching. Academic Coaches, many of whom hold doctoral degrees, provide support in areas such as scholarly writing, written communication, quantitative reasoning, and research design and analysis, while Alumni Navigators assist students with course navigation, study strategies, time management, educational technology use, and related academic challenges. The ASC also offers a Proofreading Service staffed by experienced doctoral-level team members who support diverse writing and communication needs.
To expand access to timely support, students can connect through Ask the ASC (ASC Chat, text, or question submission) without scheduling an appointment. The ASC also offers daily synchronous drop-in Power Hours, study sessions, and workshops that provide structured and flexible opportunities for academic skill development, collaborative learning, assignment support, and student engagement across disciplines.
In addition to live support options, the ASC website provides a robust collection of self-directed academic resources available 24/7, including templates, video tutorials, academic guides, and citation support tools. Faculty are encouraged to collaborate with the ASC by referring students for targeted support, integrating ASC resources into courses, or requesting customized workshops and learning materials
Objectives:
The Academic Success Center objectives are:
Mission:
The mission of the Academic Success Center (ASC) is to support students through the process of learning and developing their identities as scholars and practitioners.
Vision:
The Academic Success Center strives to promote academic achievement by working collaboratively with students and faculty to promote learning and engagement as lifelong consumers of knowledge.
The Academic Success Center (ASC) launched in June 2014. In the beginning, sessions were focused on assisting students with writing and statistics assignments. In 2016, a major paradigm shift occurred during which the center moved away from a tutoring model focusing on a specific deliverable toward an academic coaching model with a focus on skill development. During the same year, the live chat feature launched, providing students with a venue to ask quick questions and receive immediate assistance. Two years later, the Academic Success Center transitioned the ASC Chat service and website to the Springshare platform. The new platform provided students with more modes (text, email, and live chat) to access ASC services.
The data-driven refinement and expansion of the services available in the ASC is an ongoing process. In FY20, the ASC expanded the hours that the chat service was available to include evenings and weekends. During that same time, the number of interactive weekly group sessions increased from 17 to 25, and individual coaching opportunities were increased to meet the needs of the NU community. One of the most notable additions to the ASC during FY20 was the expansion of support to include legal writing. In addition to the ongoing expansion of services, during FY21, the ASC launched a proofreading service to support students working to prepare their dissertation manuscripts for publishing.
