The Weekly: Go to office hours

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The Weekly: Go to office hours
Delp Hall | Wikimedia Commons

The shock of first-day-of-class syllabi is wearing off into the day-to-day grind. As the rubber hits the road — or, more literally, the backside of a pencil hits the math homework —  it’s tempting to take the blows of tests and bad grades with an “I was told I’d be average, what can I do?” attitude.

There is something more you can do: Get up and go to office hours.

Hillsdale professors are stellar. The Princeton Review ranked their accessibility No. 16 in the nation this year — and that’s because Hillsdale students said they were. Our professors think deeply and speak eloquently, and most of all, they care about their subjects and their students.

This is a time for you to listen and ask questions. You probably won’t prove your intelligence in office hours. Your thesis statement will wither, your analysis of Aristotle’s “Ethics” will flounder before the philosophers of Delp Hall.

But you will show your character. An office hours visit takes humility, and it shows you care. You’re willing to sacrifice your own time to learn from someone greater.

You’ll come away smarter, maybe with a better grade on the horizon. But, more important, you’ll have formed some kind of relationship. You’re at Hillsdale to grow spiritually and morally, not just intellectually. Go to office hours, and make your time here count.

The opinion of the Collegian editorial staff.