TU advertises itself as an academically rigorous university. This was one of the main reasons why I chose to apply to TU, and my experiences in class have met this expectation. Classes are academically challenging and fun, and hard work is rewarded. There is never a dull moment in any of my classes. When I think about one of the most rewarding experiences in a challenging class, my mind always turns to Professor Eric Olson’s statistics 2 class, which I took during the fall of my sophomore year. Statistics is not an easy subject, and after struggling immensely in Statistics 1 the previous semester due to the switch to online classes, I was not expecting to come into the subsequent class with a deep understanding of the material. I could not have been more wrong in my assumption. Professor Olson understood that online learning was not an ideal situation, and that people were struggling with the material from the previous class. He took the time to reteach vital concepts from Statistics 1 so that we would have a solid foundation for the harder material covered in Statistics 2. While this meant that we had to move quickly through lessons during the latter half of the semester, it didn’t matter because we understood the material at a deep level and could apply it to harder concepts. This experience taught me several things. 
For one, I learned that talking to your professors is very important. If our class had not spoken out about our concern for the material, Professor Olson would not have known that we didn’t understand concepts from the previous class. Second, I learned that being able to completely deviate from the initial syllabus to accommodate a struggling class would only have been possible with the small class sizes that we have here at TU. If this had been a large section at a bigger university, the professor probably would not have been very receptive to feedback from students. This is only one example of a class that covers difficult material in a good way. With both small class sizes and academically rigorous material, TU is a good choice for people that want to understand challenging material at a deep level and feel the reward of hard work because of it.