“Hello, I am Griffin Johnson, the team leader of ‘Terrific Tutors’ or the Tech Tutoring team through the student Outreach program here at Michigan Tech. Our team is composed of me, Landon Harazin, Bayden Tapert, Braden Gagnon, and Aidan DeVos. Our team works together productively, especially with cooperation, communication, and adaptability. Every person has a unique role even though we all work together as one individual unit by helping each other out wherever we see is needed. With our coordinator in the Outreach program, Catherine Jordan, we are assigned to tutor and help students of underprivileged schools in our area for the goal of possibly impacting the social innovation here in our community. With Catherine having previous relationships built with some of the local high schools, we were able to focus our tasks on working with the Baraga Area School System to help tutor their freshman and sophomore students on preparation for the upcoming PSAT. In the past few weeks, we have worked on creating informative presentations, handouts, and practice problems to assist the students in becoming aware of the PSAT, what is to be expected from it, how to study for it, how the test impacts their futures, and other tips and tricks. So far we have successfully had two tutoring sessions in Baraga. In the first session, we split our team between the sophomores and the freshmen. In the second session, we all went to the sophomores to have more of a relaxed, fun, and engaging tutoring session. This tutoring results in a major impact for EmpowerUP, as we are giving students the same opportunities for success as the more privileged schools and students who have greater access to valued preparation for their PSAT and SAT tests than the students in Baraga. It is a great pleasure to do what we have done as a team and know that we are helping our own community one step at a time.”
Current team members, Spring 2025