Most new students discover that the weeks after Thanksgiving are extremely intense with papers to complete and preparation for final exams. Hence, they need to study more. At the same time, they often have difficulty concentrating. To help yourself concentrate:

• find a study space that you use only for studying. Ideally, the space is in a quiet, distraction-free location.

• create a list of everything you need to get finished before the end of the semester and break your work into smaller chunks that can be accomplished in individual study sessions.

• establish a study goal for each session. Make sure the goal is reasonable and can be accomplished in the time you allotted. Make your goals precise (for example, review chapters 1 through 3, complete my lab report, prepare a first draft of my short history paper ... ).

• avoid day dreaming by reminding yourself of the goal for the study session and reward yourself for achieving the goal.

• take a study break when you complete the goal. Take your breaks in a different location and do something active.

The Student Health Center provides a variety of services to meet the medical needs of Truman students. The Health Center has eight staff members:  a receptionist, three registered nurses, three family nurse practitioners, and a collaborating physician.   Come to the Health Center for acute illnesses, minor injuries, patient education, allergy injections, immunizations, and gynecological/sexually transmitted infections services. To schedule an appointment, please call the front desk at 785-4182 during regular business hours.  The Health Center is open Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. when classes are in session.  The Health Center is closed daily from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. for lunch.  To see a healthcare provider, make an appointment or come to one of the walk-in clinics on Monday and Friday mornings from 8:00 am. to 11:00 am. The Health Center is located in the McKinney Center. 

Quote of the Week

"Liberal education was originally called liberal because it was supposed to liberate men to apply their minds, their critical thoughts to the most important decisions of their lives: how to act, who or what to love, what to call good or true or beautiful. We all know, of course, that much that traveled under the name of liberal education did not in fact liberate, because it was not in fact a removal of ignorance but an indoctrination with new forms of ignorance; or because the ignorance it removed was trivial and the knowledge substituted was not of how to use the critical intelligence but of how to use a collection of information--more or less accurate--for social climbing--to impress your peers and inferiors with so-called learned. ... Only in knowledge, only in the right kind of knowledge can we liberate ourselves to make free choices. Without knowledge we may have the illusion of free choice; we may embrace political programs and schools of art and world views with as much passion as if  we had knowledge, but our seeming choices are really what other men had imposed upon us.

"There are many ways of talking about the kinds of education that genuinely liberate. At the risk of being too gimmicky, I'd like to suggest a way of reviving that tired old list, the three 'Rs.' Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic made up a highly simplified minimal list of the arts of liberation: to be able to read is to be free to learn what other men know; to be able to write is to be free to teach or move to change other men with your words; and to be able to calculate is to be freed at least from enslavement to other men's calculations. If I had time tonight, I'd like to expand the first two of these into four 'Rs.' The new list would have reading and writing mixed up in every one of the four, and it would run like this: first, Recovery of meanings, the seemingly simple but never finally mastered ability to learn what other men have known or believed; second, the art of Rejection of whatever is false or enslaving in other men's meanings; third, the art of Renewing or Renovation or Recognizing or Re-presenting (the thesaurus yields lots of 'Rs' here) what is valid or worthwhile in other men's meaning; and finally, the art of Revising or Revolutionizing thought by discovering genuinely new truth."

--From The Aims of Education, a convocation address at the

University of Chicago in 1970 by Wayne C. Booth