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Advising excellence is critical to student success. NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising (NACADA) offers guidance on academic advising excellence and why it matters. Realizing these lofty goals is particularly challenging in a large, decentralized university context. This article, cowritten with an undergraduate student, is an interdisciplinary thought exercise that applies key constructs from Hospitality Management to academic advising. Although there are many relevant cross-disciplinary connections, this piece focuses on providing consistency in the advising experience for students from diverse academic colleges.
Academic Core Advising is a hub-and-spoke model of academic advising that incorporates professional academic advising, faculty mentoring, and staff support to reduce student barriers and improve student success. This article details the need for advising shifts at a mid-size, public, flagship institution. Discussion includes the process for change, success of the model thus far, and hopes for continued success in the future.
Higher education professionals routinely encounter situations that warrant ethical decision-making. Often, team members find themselves navigating ethical dilemmas without the proper training. This results in team members experiencing a lack of confidence in addressing ethical situations, employing inconsistent approaches and compromising the quality and integrity within a team. It is imperative that leaders foster a culture that promotes ethical decision-making. This article shares how supervisors and administrators can educate and empower team members to foster the development of ethical decision-making skills. Strategies to create a foundation to effectively instill ethical decision-making within teams are provided. Pearls of wisdom that supervisors and administrators can share with team members are highlighted.
In the shared responsibility of academic advising, we are attuned to pay close attention to students' nonverbal cues. Less often discussed, however, are strategies for the academic advisor in improving their own understanding of the ways in which conscious and unconscious gestures may subtly buoy or inhibit trust-building in an advising relationship. Using Schlossberg's (1989) Marginality and Mattering as a theoretical framework, two specific forms of nonverbal communications "the 5 gestures lines and energy states" will be explored and how appropriately determining and expressing nonverbal emotion affects the student experience.
In the advent of recent, new technologies shaping the world, it’s important to consider how the advising community can best use technology to leverage student resources and implement strategies that meet institutional goals or metrics. Many institutions are already compiling important data to create individualized support systems and interventions to increase student success and support institutional goals. This shift to data gathering and analysis can drastically alter the individualized support students can receive and will allow for more meaningful interactions between the advisor and advisee during sessions. Most importantly, this work highlights collaboration within institutions and a shared responsibility for student success.
Advising STEM community college transfer students takes some specific considerations to bring up in advising meetings. Looking at the demographics of who attends community colleges in the United States in 2023, community college student mental health, and specific STEM transfer success ideas will help advisors know some areas to focus on in their transfer appointments for community college STEM students. This is the start of the conversation of how to make the STEM transfer process smoother and more clear for community college students in the United States.
This article focuses on the challenges faced by second-year college students, often overlooked in academia. It provides strategies for academic advisors to support these students effectively. Emphasizing the importance of advisors guiding sophomores through reflection and goal-setting. The article also advocates for flexibility, and intentionality, as well as proposing unified resources to enhance accessibility and reduce student confusion. In this article, advisors are recognized as pivotal in empowering students during this crucial phase of their educational journey.
