Quality advising is so much more than knowing curriculum requirements or being able to recite institutional policies and procedures. It involves a personal touch, the ability to put a face on the institution for students. True quality advising requires the advisor to be human, not bureaucratic. I would like to think that my students view my office as a safe haven. It is a place where they can come for what we think of as typical advising services such as major exploration and course scheduling, but also to share accomplishments, concerns and frustrations, and to seek advice on things outside the confines of their academic lives.
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A student walks into my class the first day of class and sits down. The class starts, and I begin reading names off my roster. I ask four questions of each student. I ask where they are from, what activity they are involved in on campus, if they are on a certain scholarship, and whom their advisor is. The last question usually answered by, 'I don't have an advisor.' This is where the relationship between teaching and advising comes together....
Advising students with disabilities presents many challenges to the college advisor. However, skilled advising can go a long way towards ensuring the success of a student with a disability. To effectively advise a student with a disability requires a thorough understanding of the student’s goals as well as the student’s disability, the barriers the institution may have inadvertently created, and the resources the college provides that can be used to assist the student in pursuing his or her educational aspirations.
The adoption of electronic communication technologies over the past decade has changed the nature of advisors' daily work. Voice mail, e-mail, and Web sites were introduced with the promise of helping us connect to our students. Judging from the flood of student contact these technologies produced, it can be said they have been successful. Most of us are drowning in incoming e-mail messages with overflowing inboxes and blinking lights on our voice mail. Responding effectively to student inquires requires an integrated managed use of these technologies.
Good advising may be the single most underestimated characteristic of a successful college experience as noted by evidence gathered from 1,600 one-on-one undergraduate interviews. Several of the overarching findings from these interviews are 'actionable' by advisors. I look forward to sharing details from these findings with you at the NACADA national conference. However, since June brings freshman enrollment in many areas, I thought that you might benefit from a brief summary of the findings most applicable to advising incoming students.
Multicultural awareness is essential for academic advisors, for our cultural identity "is central to what we see, how we make sense of what we see, and how we express ourselves."
In these economic times, meeting the needs of so many diverse student populations can be a challenge. However I believe there are steps a college or university can take to effectively, and efficiently, provide quality services.
Diversity, interdisciplinarity, and professionalism are gauges by which we measure improvement over the last several decades. Part of the improvement is due to faculty and professional advisors who support these changes. The classic relationship between a faculty research supervisor and a master’s, doctoral or professional student is still the essential relationship. Built around that, whether at the large research institution, a small college, or the professional school, those who advise strive to meet the needs of today’s graduate and professional students.
What makes advising at a rural, isolated community college different is that the advisor does it all. You are the guide, the coach and the cheerleader. You do the placement testing because there is no testing center; you interpret the Strong Interest Inventory and MBTI because there is no career services specialist; you do the orientation program because there is no separate department for that. The whole student services process from recruiting to graduation is in your hands. The job requires good listening and problem-solving skills, organization and communication, and the exercise of good judgment when faced with counseling situations that are beyond your training and expertise. Most importantly, it requires genuine care for students. The advisor is really on the front lines, but the rewards are great. When you see a student achieve his or her goal—which may or may not include graduation—the experience is priceless.
Critical to a defined and successful university advising program is keen administrative support that is manifest in the articulated expectation of quality advising. Certainly a reward system which includes advising as a priority is appropriate within a university culture which values and supports advising. Further, as administrators, we frequently have deep concerns about retention, when our primary focus should be the quality of advising.
Academic advisors face increasing challenges each year. What are the most effective ways to deal with enrollment increases when there has been little or no increase in budget? How do we handle the advising needs of these students? How can colleges effectively cope with the increasing numbers of transfer students? How can we use orientations to enhance advisement? These are just a few of the many challenges faced every day by advisors at most colleges, but particularly at two-year colleges.
For each of these three visitors the adviser plays a critical role. It is much more than course selection and graduation requirements. The relationship with Mike, Selina, and Caroline and many others like them can become a key ingredient in their undergraduate experience, and the success of the relationship depends on a full range of talents. In truth, Mike, Selina, and Caroline are drawn from advising experiences I have had over the years. While they may be literally fictional, I have seen such students, and so have you. They are a daily reminder of the challenges and rewards of our profession.
Here we will begin to explore how best to approach advising relationships in a multiculturally competent way, mindful of both the individual and cultural similarities and differences between advisor and advisee, and how those factors may influence the advising process. Suggestions are based on the author’s personal experience in helping relationships (i.e. mental health and career counseling), as well as the counseling psychology and intercultural communication literatures. The intention is to provide a description of a “both/and” approach to preparing for multicultural helping relationships. This approach can be useful with all students, regardless of how culturally similar or dissimilar advisor and advisee are, because all people are cultural beings. The objective of this article is to provide advisors with questions and principles to consider in interactions with students.
The unique qualities that shape the lives of Millennials must be considered when creating plans for their benefit. Solutions that worked for previous generations must be modified to be effective. Advisors and administrators must utilize millennial student research in order to help these students effectively manage their time. We must embrace this research to facilitate an environment that is most beneficial to our students.
Academic advisors must be in tune with the remarkable changes unfolding in today’s workplace. By expanding or refining their career advising competencies they can play a vital role in helping students understand the importance of educational and career goal setting and how the decisions they make in college might influence satisfaction and success in their future personal and work lives.
Suzanne M. Trump (Assistant Dean of Retention and Academic Advising, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia) and Janet Spence (Director, University-Wide Advising Practice, Office of the Provost/Undergraduate Affairs, University of Louisville) share what they gained from the NACADA Administrators’ and Assessment Institutes.
The Action Plan I crafted at the 2005 NACADA Summer Institute focused on the interactions between our academic advisors, IPFW students and their families. My charge was to find a way to include family in the advising conversation without taking attention away from student development and still work within FERPA guidelines. I applied the following process, adapted from Robert Sternberg's (1987) Successful Intelligence, to this issue.
In the fall of 2006, I boldly went where no other “non-faculty” academic advisor at Seward County Community College had gone before; I joined the teaching scholar learning community. Why? One word: CURIOSITY. I wanted to test the catchy academic advising slogan, Advising is Teaching. I kept asking myself, if advising is teaching, then what links the two domains? What tools can we use to showcase these similarities? And how do we obtain buy-in from all stakeholders, especially students? As an academic advisor and a teaching scholar participant, I made it my charge to find this essential element.
Today academic advisors, accustomed to the >hectic pace of student advisement appointments, find that it is not just students who show up at their doors; increasingly students are accompanied by their parents. Howe and Strauss (2000) point to an increased level of parental involvement during the college years of the millennial students: traditional-aged students who are characterized as being “close to their parents.” Many advisors struggle to find effective strategies for working with parents who accompany students to advising sessions.
Our relevance assures student engagement, and engagement assures student success. Therefore, our relevancy will ensure successful students (Prentiss, 2007). Are we, as advisors, acting irresponsibly by avoiding FacebookTM? Building on Julie Traxler’s (2007) article, Advising Without Walls: An Introduction to Facebook as an Advising Tool, which focuses on the benefits of using this social networking Web site, I hope to show that, with proper care and an eye toward maintaining relevance, Facebook could be one of our most valuable tools for student engagement.
Today’s parents are often characterized as obstacles in the development of student independence and autonomy. However, results from the recent National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) show that students whose parents intervened on their behalf experienced “greater gains on a host of desired college outcomes, and greater satisfaction with the college experience” (NSSE, 2007, p. 25). Despite this information, college personnel often struggle with parental involvement in their students’ academic affairs; many personnel believe that the path to development of student self-sufficiency and decision-making is blocked by well-meaning, hovering parents. Instead of viewing parental involvement as obtrusive and intrusive, personnel on college campuses should embrace the potential for building a partnership with parents. Academic advisors, in particular, are in the unique position to partner with parents in a relationship that will benefit those with a vested interest in students’ success: parents, students, and advisors.
The issues of social justice and equity are growing in importance across the academy... Although NACADA (2008) “promotes and supports quality academic advising in institutions of higher education to enhance the educational development of students” (¶1), how often do academic advisors examine their roles in upholding social justice through advising?
Just when advisors say, “I’ve finally seen it all!” an advising experience takes place that is so unusual, extraordinary, or just plain weird that it feels like an April Fool’s Day prank...expect the unexpected. In the world of academic advising, no two students and no two problems are exactly the same.
Our advising exchanges can be more than one-sided interactions; consider moving beyond a discussion on the conversation spectrum and closer towards dialogue. Even if we can’t engage in a true dialogue for all of our advising appointments, there are some aspects of dialogue advisors can use regularly to improve the quality of conversations with advisees.
Advisors who know their students' talents and understand their faculty colleagues' gifts for helping the student grow occupy an unique position where they can facilitate strong relationships between advisees and their professors.
In the classroom, students compose essays in stages that include several drafts that are edited by peers and the instructor. Following steps enables students to see how the parts create and relate to the finished essay and requires writing with direction and purpose. When I look at these steps as an advisor, I see how they could occur on a smaller scale in one session, or how they may occur before, during, or over multiple sessions with one or more advisor(s).
Motivational Interviewing allows the student and advisor to work in collaboration, with the student choosing initial behavioral changes to improve the current situation. These small first steps can lead to additional behaviors beneficial to the academic success of the student.
The use of “customer service” techniques in academic advising is controversial because of mixed perceptions regarding the definition of the word “service.” Many advisors fear the adverse effects this shift could have on the student-advisor relationship...How do advisors meet the service expectations of students while remaining true to our student development roots?
Most advisors encounter student lies during our careers. It is helpful if we have a game plan ready to address these issues with students and still maintain a professional advising relationship.
The blog platform allows unprecedented student access within our college community and helps us improve the continuity of the information stream to students.
It is my hope that students’ memory of me is not as an advisor sitting behind a desk, poring over Banner reports and paper files. I hope the image in their mind’s eye is of me walking, or running, somewhere on campus. I hope they remember me conversing with others and having an open door, because there is no door. I hope my example challenges them as professionals to be as accessible to their clients, patients, or students as I have tried to be for them.
Three primary lessons have been learned in the years since Louisiana State University Eunice’s Pathways to Success program began: (1) students follow directions if they know what to do, (2) the program is labor intensive, and (3) communication, cooperation, and consensus-building are crucial.
While developing the blog, we kept in mind two main goals: create original and relevant content, and provide a welcoming and empowering virtual space to help students academically succeed..
In this new era of online education, traditional models of academic advising may not be suitable for advisors serving nontraditional students.
It is important for advisors to remember that the higher education transition for students does take time. And sometimes, perhaps many times, a student will try their very best and be unsuccessful. One of our jobs is to help them as they navigate the uncomfortable growth process surrounding those experiences.
Two advisors discuss the quest to bridge the way students and their information are handed off between departments and advisors.
Many people, including advisors, struggle with paying attention. If this inability to pay attention occurs during advising appointments, opportunities could be lost to connect with students. Nevertheless, it is possible to increase one’s ability to pay attention and increase effectiveness in completing tasks with the practice of mindfulness.
The fight or flight instinct is not unique to students or academic stress, but it might not be a connection the students have previously made. When advisors recognize the link between this biological instinct and student behavior, they can better educate, mentor, and guide students to a healthier and more productive response to stressful situations.
As with any profession, academic advising requires training, but institutions often struggle to identify a centralized resource or approach for implementing advisor training. With obstacles of limited financial support, workloads stretched beyond capacity, and autonomous centers with disparate advising structures, advisor training has been a challenge for many institutions. The authors offer their advisor training as a potential model for other institutions.
The authors discuss an initiative developed to fill a gap in professional development opportunities available to the academic advisors at their institution.
Implementing a successful outcomes assessment plan, particularly one that assesses learning and performance across campus units, is a big undertaking. The authors consider ten essential, intangible elements of any successful outcomes assessment endeavor.
The author contends that gathering data for outcomes assessment or research does not have to be complicated, mysterious, or difficult.
This article introduces solution-focused advising, a framework built and adapted from solution-focused counseling theory, as another tool for advisors to utilize within their approaches.
The author finds that the use of collaborative note writing changes the one directional aspect of advising notes while staying true to the original purpose.
The authors contend that it is important to provide high quality online advising services that allow for comprehensive, face-to-face interactions with students, even when those students are off campus. With limited resources and demands on time, it is also critical to design an online advising option that is sustainable long-term.
With increasing numbers of student veterans entering the nation’s colleges and universities, it is critical that professionals in higher education understand the unique perspectives and experiences they bring to the campus and that appropriate models to support their academic success are developed.
All around the world, educators find that parents of college students today are more involved than ever before. Culture is an important factor in exploring the role of parental influence on college students. The author discusses some of the cultural factors that are particularly salient at her institution, the American University of Sharjah.
Advisors recognize that students with different enrollment patterns may have different goals and need different types of support. Knowledge of these enrollment patterns can influence conversations with students to help create both short- and long-term plans.
The author describes her experience at the 2017 NACADA Assessment Institute.
This article aims to show that when communication improves across silos, or separate entities on college campuses that rarely interact, it might increase empathy for the student-athletes and facilitate simple programmatic changes that could increase the likelihood of student-athletes successfully completing the degree programs that they would ideally like to pursue.
The HLC Academy for Student Persistence and Completion at Marshall University created the MU EDGE mentoring program to pair experienced faculty mentors with incoming “murky middle” freshmen to find out what Marshall can do to better retain this under-served population through more intrusive advising.
The author shares insights gained during her own classroom experience.
With all the talk about helicopter parents and overparenting, it can be easy to forget that many parents have an incredible investment of time, love, money, and energy in their child’s education. The authors gathered data from advisors on their perceptions of their interactions with parents and asked for examples of effective strategies for working with parents.
Most students intuitively know graduate programs differ from undergraduate programs; however, most cannot articulate how different they actually are or what those distinctions may be. The authors contend that providing an orientation program is a vital component to the transition process.
Students who do not meet minimum grade point average (GPA) requirements are generally placed on an academic warning or probationary status that is often universally applied to all students and administrated by faculty or advisors. However, each students’ reasons for missing this academic mark are unique. Regular connection with an advisor can be very impactful and meaningful to students because they are able to articulate their obstacles to someone in an open dialogue.
The author shares his own experience with academically grieving students and a process to identify such students.
Students may be like Odysseus: full of dreams, interests, fears, and confusions, ready to begin their academic, personal, social, and developmental wanderings. Graduation, much like Ithaca, is the desired destination. Advisors, like the Goddess Athena, need wisdom, knowledge, resources, and authenticity to help student find the right paths during their wanderings.
With the expansion of China’s higher education since 1998, more and more academic advisors are needed to work with Chinese undergraduates. Understanding their sophisticated social culture values is the first and necessary step for advisors in and out of China.
Advising administrators and training developers frequently ask how advisors can build relational core competencies such as communicating inclusively and conducting successful advising interactions. The author presents theory-informed practical recommendations for advisors to help address the “how” of some of the relational core competencies.
Most major academic advising theories stress the importance of the advising relationship. In advising, the quality of the relationship between advisor and student is at the heart of most interventions. The author notes that the shared focus of various advising theories on factors that foster the advisor-student relationship is very similar to the common factors theory in psychology.
In the world of improvisational (improv) comedy, advancing is the process of moving a scene forward. In the world of academic advising where student success is a central narrative, it is imperative that advisors help students advance their own scene.
Over time, academic advisors may begin to experience emotional, physical, and spiritual exhaustion from constantly witnessing and absorbing the difficulties of students. Developing self-care strategies within advising training and development can help advisors pay attention to their emotional state and allow time for reflection and healing.
Since the mid-1990s, there has been a rise in the prevalence of students diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder conditions. Interventions that offer continued support with social and educational skills may prove critical to improving success in college for students with autism.
The Bepko Learning Center at IUPUI houses a one-on-one peer-coaching program in which academically successful students are paired with their peers in order to aid them in achieving academic success. Coaches mentor other students on how to be successful in college—whether that means learning study techniques, creating weekly schedules, or setting long-term goals.
Academic advising is a term that has not yet been clearly defined in Japanese higher education.
To be an expert on the culture of all students that advisors advise and teach is unrealistic. However, getting to know each student in terms of their personal stories and backgrounds is doable. This is particularly important as the student population in higher education continues to diversify.
Black women advisors may experience the field of academic advising quite differently than their male and White peers. Sista circles have played a vital role in lives of Black women for over 150 years, providing a safe supportive space for them to seek help, encouragement, knowledge, and support in issues that impact them.
When not addressed, shame can be a saboteur silently leading students away from an institution.
In today’s 21st century economy, it is no longer enough for advisors to help students choose a major and craft a course schedule. Advisors need to help students create a step-by-step plan for achieving their long-term goals and preparing for unexpected barriers along the way. Thus, career advising is now an important function of academic advising.
The author reflects on what she has learned during a decade as an academic advising supervisor.
The culture within an office whose team provides service to others can set the tone for communicating positively in each situation, whether it is with a student, colleague, or a stakeholder.
While Erik Erikson's psychosocial theory encompasses the entire lifespan, his eight conflicts can be readily applied to an undergraduate college student's lifespan, offering a unique paradigm through which to view the student-university relationship. Advisors, particularly, play a critical role in helping students overcome each conflict/crisis.
Students who return to college after a stop out period often have stories of arduous journeys of self-discovery predicated on competing demands of personal and professional life. Listening carefully to these students’ stories can provide advisors with resources to assist them successfully navigate the challenges and obstacles that until now have prevented them from achieving their higher education goals.
Safe Conversations is an educational program that focuses on dialogue promoting a new way of talking and listening to one another. When applied appropriately, connection and safety occur which promotes respectful and healthy relationships.
Occasionally, students enter their advising session with personal baggage to share with their advisor that detours the conversation away from the normal advising issues. Knowledge of psychological first aid (PFA) give advisors tools to support students who are striving to overcome a traumatically challenging situation before making a referral to another support resource on or off campus.
In addition to helping students plan, understand, and make meaning of their best path to graduation, academic advisors consistently contribute to student success beyond the advising appointment. It is vital for academic advisors to clearly communicate the variety of advising-related responsibilities in a way that is easily understood to all constituents across campus.
When blackness, queerness, and nonconformity intersect, the burdens students carry can be profound. Studies have shown a connection between queerness and discrimination, harassment, and victimization on U.S. college campuses. Academic advisors cannot underestimate how these incidents impact the lives and academics of BQGN students. The author offers methods that can be utilized to assist these students.
Research suggests that mental health and academic performance are positively correlated. Advisors are not expected to provide mental health counseling to students, but they would be remiss to ignore the impact of psychological issues and mental health on students’ experience, performance, and success. While treating students for mental health concerns may be beyond advisors’ scope, there are some ways in which they can address the issues.
Faculty members fill many roles at the institution, but while they are experts in their field of study, they typically receive little training or preparation to serve as mentor, coach, or advisor to students. A team of primary-role advisors and advising administrators at Penn State developed a foundational on-line course designed to help the faculty advisor understand the advising role.
The high-involvement intervention model encourages developmental advising by providing students with an opportunity to gain knowledge and maintain ownership of their decisions and experiences, while at the same time allowing advisors to become an integral part of student success and development.
HBCUs have been leaders in producing and leading African American students toward health professions. Advisors must recognize HBCUs like a catalyst for change and bastion of future health professionals that need to be cultivated and mentored.
Establishing a Director of Student Academic Success position provided an opportunity to rethink outreach at the author’s institution. The goal was to remove as many barriers as possible, which resulted in distinct changes.
By accessing available student data store in institution’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, the athletics department at Nicholls State University was able to share with the coaching staff important and time sensitive information at critical and relevant points in the semester. In an effort to replicate the athletics department success, an initiative began to implement this strategy within an academic college, where data points were accessed and then reported to department chairs and faculty advisors to provide relevant data for a more intrusive advising approach with students who appear on these lists.
Scholarly production and practice-sharing can be a great challenge for advising practitioner-scholars as the demands of advising practice far outweigh the time available for developing research ideas and writing for the purpose of disseminating best practices to the field. Connection with others in the field can also be a barrier. The NACADA Virtual Idea Development Group is one writing support endeavor within the overall NACADA Writing Group initiative that seeks to develop and nurture academic writing skills.
Shifting the mindset from treating traditional undergraduate students as adolescents to recognizing them as emerging adults can allow advisors to build genuine and meaningful relationships with their advisees. Utilizing Knowles (1988) six principles of andragogy, not as a checklist but as a mindset, allows advisors to build meaningful, genuine, and authentic relationships.
For decades, higher ed institutions have been pondering how to improve retention and degree completion rates. And yet, in spite of all kinds of programs and centers and initiatives, few have really moved the needle much in the right direction. In the search for the easy answer to a complex question: How can we help our students persist?, institutions have overlooked the fact that we have been asking the wrong question all along. The revision should read: How can we help our student persist? And we need to ask it thousands of times.
Online advising may be one way to retain doctoral students. The College of Saint Mary’s Graduate Advising Space, based on NACADA’s Core Values, provides much more than the answer to “What class do I take next?”
Enhancing student success, as the purview of academic advisors, is ever-evolving, and recent success has been generated through course management software, an electronic tool that traditionally provides important links between students and their instructors.
A student’s inability to become socially integrated into the campus community can lead to both institutional and systematic departure. While a sense of belonging is beneficial to all students, it is vital to retain more black male students. Students’ relationships with their academic advisor is one where belonging can develop.
Notes are instrumental for student success and instructors understand that, but do academic advisors?
After 15 years in advising and 26 in higher education, the author has decided to use humor when explaining academic advising.
The human mind is full of complex emotions and often these emotions drive us to places that we may not have prepared for. As academic advisors, we see students display a range of emotions every day. When deciding the best role for an advisor working with students experiencing negative affective emotions, it may be best to consider an advisor’s training and the context of the situation.
The term holistic advising has existed in the field of academic advising for years, but as an aspect of an office’s approach, not necessarily as a central design element in supporting students. When the word holistic is applied to advising, it suggests that advisors cannot look at students through a purely academic lens, but rather must regard them as a whole person.
The author suggests the time has come to shift academic advising practices from a Millennial framework to a Generation Z (Gen Z) approach.
Academic advisors are witnessing a growing population of students that identify as first generation. These students need validation that they belong in a university setting and that their degree is attainable.
The continued influx of international students at American higher education institutions demands a better understanding of the motivation, background, needs, expectations, and challenges of these students which can only be achieved through adequate training for academic advisors.
The effects of some student interactions last longer than the appointment time slot. Sometimes they last a lifetime. It is not always the student who exits the meeting feeling impacted.
Meeting students on their level via social media usage has helped the authors become more holistic in their advising approach.
The author shares lessons learned from an experience with improvisation.
With the sheer number of duties that academic advisors face, it is a challenge to consistently preserve fundamental elements of communication. Nudges are powerful tools that, if designed correctly, can motivate students via encouraging, informing, or preventing.
There is a lot of time and energy that goes into creating spaces for difficult conversations. The payoff is realized when students can come in, be recognized for their identities, feel a sense of belonging, then go on to graduate.
At-risk adult learners face a myriad of challenges when it comes to degree completion. In order to effectively build relationships with this population, student affairs professionals should be aware of their communication strategies. Utilizing Social Penetration Theory and the Appreciative Advising model can allow for student affairs professionals to form a stream-lined communication plan with these at-risk adult learners, in order to help them be successful.
