Fayetteville Technical Community College’s Student Learning Center has had a few names and several locations through the years, but it has always been solid, reliable, helpful. Students approaching it are feeling anxious, exhausted, or mystified, but they leave with answers. And the only thing that anybody ever needs is a student ID.

In the Learning Center, alongside our director Kareka Chavis, we’ve worked with several students, but our oldest student, who had no trouble whatsoever with computers and who took classes simply because she loved to learn, was 85.

We have students from most of the continents, many dozens of countries, and of course Fort Bragg. They have children or even grandchildren, jobs and spouses, medical conditions or test anxiety.
They were inducted into the National Honor Society yesterday, or they’re being deployed tomorrow. They haven’t taken a class in 35 years, or they’ll be receiving high school diplomas and associate degrees on the same happy evening in May. From here, they’ll be going to Pembroke or Princeton. They have no idea what they want to do, or they’ve had the same dream since they were six years old.

When they visit us, they’re met by talented instructors who take tremendous satisfaction from watching the light turn on in a student’s mind. We tutor in English and anything that requires writing (sociology, history, religion, psychology, biology…), in every imaginable level of math, in chemistry and Spanish and accounting, in the scary behemoth known as computer science.

Classroom professors donate their time to work alongside our students a couple of hours a week. We have separate but neighboring math, writing, and science labs.

We partner with the men’s and women’s basketball teams, the baseball and softball teams, and the volleyball team, all of whose athletes spend time with us. Nursing and dental-technology students come with their study groups because our smaller rooms are conducive to serious concentrating. And every now and then we have something for everyone to eat because, after all, man does not live by Excel alone.

When COVID struck, we and our students needed a minute to regain our mental equilibrium. The entire campus was eerily quiet, and everything seemed unfamiliar. We recovered, but vast numbers of our classes were converted to online. Now, after a couple of years, the online courses co-exist peacefully with their face-to-face counterparts, but students of all ages and backgrounds have moments or entire semesters of desperately needing personal attention and immediate answers to questions. Of course, here we still are, upstairs in the VCC building.

Last week, I had students from Egypt, South Korea, Senegal, Yemen, India and Nigeria. And Hope Mills, Spring Lake and Raeford. All of them were panicked about the essays that needed to be written today, from scratch, and submitted tonight. Typical day in the Student Learning Center! Let us help you find your way forward! For more information contact tuleym@faytechcc.edu or 910-678-8266.