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Students who wait until they are faced with an obstacle to generate alternative opportunities in career development can experience a shock that they are not prepared to deal with. Their initial plan is the only direction they have considered, and when the road blocks appear, students cannot see beyond them.
There is much debate in the academic advising community regarding the efficacy (or even possibility) of a unifying theory of academic advising.
Each year the question of whether or not to implement mandatory advising seems to surface across a variety of venues and mailing lists. In addressing this question, campuses must be able to answer other questions about how they meet student needs. When campuses pose an essential outcomes-based question, they strengthen their ability to conceive the most integrative and holistic solutions for ensuring that students can achieve desired advising outcomes.
The notion of peer mentoring for Indigenous students has captured all aspects of the author’s life, inspiring passion for development of a thriving and positive student community where students do not have to feel like just a student number, but a member of the community.
Over the past 10 years at the University of Hawai‘i’s Mānoa Advising Center (MAC), a number of small but significant changes have been made in the way that mandatory advising is offered—namely in format and tone—that have had a big impact in helping advisors to more efficiently and proactively assist their students.
Academic advisors promote student development through providing readily accessible information and guidance to students and by helping them feel stimulated and challenged as they work toward meeting their academic goals. Academic advisors can also help students develop in other ways outside of a traditional advising appointment.
High-achieving students come with great potential, but also great need for assistance, even though that may seem counter intuitive. High-achieving students have challenges of their own, such as dealing with perfectionism and lack of guidance and support for lofty goals.
Whether a student is attending a community college, a private liberal arts college, or anything in between, the inclusion of career competency or soft skill development into conversations with undecided students is important because it sets students up to apply, transfer, and integrate various aspects of their experiences.
As new standards develop to meet the changing needs of higher education, group advising has become an essential component of student success. Group advising offers avenues of support that help students adjust to college life, reinforce and improve skills vital to persistence in college, and develop skills that are increasingly essential in the professional world.
Scholarly and theoretical underpinnings of academic advising acknowledge the importance of the relational component of advising. A common factors meta-model of academic advising suggests that several factors can be applied to the advisor-student interaction to increase student persistence, regardless of specific advising theory or practice.
Advisors have to find balance between building relationships with students and ensuring students have the tools to successfully meet major and institutional requirements. Advisors know how important a relationship connection can be to a student in helping them progress to graduation, but limited time with students can create pressure to focus on the tasks at hand.
