Use Your Professors for What They Are Meant For

Leon Hu ‘29

Opinion Editor

It still boggles my mind how little so much of our student body uses the advantages of the liberal arts education. This is not to say that the model or Trinity itself is without faults; rather, it is that if we all chose to come to Trinity and all find ourselves on the same campus, we ought to use the experience to its fullest potential. 

Trinity has a wealth of benefits, but they come at a cost. We placed in the top 10 most expensive private US colleges in 2025, and we remain a highly selective institution with a 29% overall acceptance rate. Consequently, if you find yourself at a school charging over $90,000 annually in tuition and fees that rejects thousands of applicants a year, it is likely because you decided that the benefits of the liberal arts model justified these costs. 

In that case, we should expect to use those benefits to their utmost potential, and one of the most potent benefits of a liberal arts college is the sheer access to resources to professors that we have at Trinity. One of the biggest selling points of our school is our 9:1 student-faculty ratio and the incredibly small class sizes we enjoy. Our biggest classes, like BIOL-182, cap at under 100 students per section. Most of the classes found on an average schedule tend to be under 30. Thus, compared to many larger, less expensive, and less selective schools, we have ridiculously high access to our professoriate. Even if it does not fully justify the $90,000 price tag and selectivity of our school, it is a major contributing factor towards both. So why do we not use it to its fullest?

There seems to be a common scenario in many classes: a student does poorly on a test and goes to their professor, only to find out immediately that the best advice is to simply ask questions in class, use provided study materials and go to office hours. Despite having access to many of these things, many of us do not use them. So many academic struggles can be resolved by simply taking the time to go to your professors and allow them to do what they get paid to do: teach and mentor students. 

A twenty-minute stop by a professor’s office hours is incredibly low-investment and high-reward. Not only can it clear up any lingering issues — you basically get twenty minutes to get answers to any questions you might have about class — but you also can get the equivalent of a short class composed of one student, which is you. Office hours are a time for you to get any additional instruction that you may need for your success, and it pays off very quickly. 

Additionally, it ensures that your professors know who you are. Given our small class sizes, chances are they already know your name simply by being in class, but going to office hours allows them to know you. Regardless of your career path, academic or not, networking is inevitable. Office hours count as a diet version of networking. If your professors know that you are a hardworking student who is willing to attend their office hours when nobody else in a 80-student section is, they will rightfully think better of you, and any opportunities they may have are that much more likely to be sent your way. 

Even just reaching out with questions through email works wonders. It is not always easy to get questions answered in class, whether for time or uncertainty, but there is no pressure when typing away at a keyboard. And our professors are very responsive — many can get you a solid response in hours, more than enough time to get some additional info in before an exam.

Most importantly, our professors are here at Trinity and not other schools because they enjoy teaching. This is a prestigious school with a focus on research, but we remain a very small, student-centered school. If a qualified faculty candidate chooses to come to Trinity instead of, say, a larger institution with larger labs and more funding, it is probably because they enjoy working closely with students in the way that our school enables. 

Our ultimate strength, then, becomes our unique faculty body who are highly qualified, highly involved with research and willing to put the time in to make sure that our education is successful. We have all worked hard to get here, and we pay the cost of being at a small, prestigious liberal arts college. The reward is the bond we can build with faculty. Thus, the next time you consider how to prepare for an exam, consider the value of the school you chose to receive your degree from. It pays to know your professors — but you also pay to get that opportunity to begin with.