Tutor Story: Jonathan Franklin

“Basketball. I love basketball. I’m a huge fan and I play it myself.”

Jonathan Franklin is a fourth year accounting student at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. Jonathan plans on furthering his education by pursuing an MBA in Finance after completing his undergraduate degree in the spring. While he just started tutoring this semester, teaching is in his blood.

“My mother is a strong educator. She was a professor, so I’ve had the chance to see what tutoring looks like.”

This might explain why tutoring has come so easily to Jonathan, but what made him decide to get started on Knack in the first place?

“One, the flexibility of it all. And, two, the opportunity to better strengthen my skills for after school because the classes I tutor are fundamental to the area that I’m studying.”

So far, Jonathan has been taking full advantage of Knack, quickly establishing himself as one of the top tutors at FAMU. According to Jonathan, having a strong support system has helped him get off to such a strong start.

“I have a good friend, Raydine Gordon, who is also a tutor on Knack. She has a lot of material that she went over in her financial accounting class, and I’m a little bit better at explaining it, so we’ll kind of work hand in hand to help our clientele and keep the students coming back.”

Jonathan certainly has no problem keeping students coming back, seeing as every student he’s worked with so far has done just that.

“The way that I keep them coming is really that I don’t give them too much in one session. I’ve noticed that students don’t want to come in and hit a whole bunch of work. If I try to over-cram them with too much information, they get frustrated and don’t retain it. So, what I try to do is hit one subject at a time and really drill it down. Then I pick it up where we left off in the next session.”

When it comes to finding students who need help in the first place, Jonathan quickly learned that his services were in high demand.

“My first student was through the Knack App. She needed assistance in financial accounting, so I reached out to her to see what she needed help with. That gave me a chance to see how it was working before I actually went out and started getting people. After that, being involved with other things on campus allowed me to use my platform to recruit students who need help with accounting because a lot of students definitely need help when it comes to that kind of subject.”

While Jonathan is now well established within the School of Business and Industry, this wasn’t always the case. In fact, Jonathan enrolled at FAMU with the intention of studying engineering.

“I went to an engineering magnet school for high school, so I came in my freshman year as an engineering student. Around the spring semester of my freshman year, after realizing engineering wasn’t really my thing, I started getting interested in investing and finance.”

So, Jonathan decided to change his major to pursue his passion for business, and that’s when he really started to hit his stride.

“I wasn’t really involved my freshman year. My sophomore year is when I actually started getting involved with some of these different organizations on campus.”

This led to Jonathan becoming an orientation leader, tasked with helping students transition smoothly into life at FAMU.

“I’m a liaison for the school. When students get accepted, they have to attend an orientation, and I’m the first person they see. I help them pick their classes, learn the campus, get introduced to their advisors, and different things of that nature.”

Since his sophomore year, Jonathan has taken on additional leadership roles in several student organizations. After seeing the impact this has had on his own development, Jonathan encourages the students he tutors to get involved on campus.

“I like to talk about getting involved because, while you grow a lot in the classroom, the majority of your growing comes from doing different things outside of the classroom and really learning how to manage your time. I try to tell students to make sure they get involved with things that are really gonna help them.”

For Jonathan, tutoring on Knack has quickly become one of those things.

“Knack has definitely helped a lot. I was just telling Dr. Hill about it the other day because it’s helping me go over everything I learned in the past, but it’s also helping me learn how to really create my own schedule and be my own moneymaker.”

On top of everything else, Jonathan has managed to find something else he has a Knack for.

“I’ve started getting into financial planning and budgeting. I’m learning how to help people when it comes to financial management, so going over these topics again as a tutor has helped me when it comes to helping my friends and family with their financial planning.”

When Jonathan is not tutoring, studying, running student organizations, providing free financial planning services, playing basketball, or hanging out with his friends, he is usually reading.

“I like to read a lot, usually books related to business.”

Exhibiting yet another trait that most highly successful people share, it’s apparent that Jonathan Franklin has a great future ahead of him. As for now, though, he’s making sure to live in the moment and enjoy the rest of his time in college.

“I’m just trying to enjoy my college experience because once I get into the real working world, it will be a lot more responsibilities and a lot less social time.”

Wise words from a man who is clearly wise beyond his years. We’re honored to be part of this college experience by enabling Jonathan to help even more of his peers, and we look forward to seeing what the future holds in store for him.