It is exciting to see the transition academic advising has made historically from being considered solely a prescriptive course registration activity to an integral element of the teaching and learning mission of an institution and the core of a serious student success, persistence, and engagement initiative. Institutions are seriously investigating and evaluating their academic advising programs not just based on poor student satisfaction or due to financial restraints resulting in finding those “nice to have” programs that can be cut. Instead we are seeing institutions and systems taking broad campus-wide approaches to developing strategies for investigating and assessing the effects of academic advising on student learning as well as student persistence and graduation. In addition we see institutional or system-wide initiatives that are developing exciting and innovative collaborations that connect faculty, administrators, and professional advisors and link academic advising more intentionally to first-year student programs, career development programs, residence life programs, and special populations programs to aggressively alter the undergraduate learning experiences of our students.
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The beginning of a new academic year is always a busy, often exhausting, but exciting for all educators and students but especially for academic advisors, whether we be professional advisors, faculty advisors, peer advisors, or graduate student advisors. As advisors not only are we focused on all we need to learn for a new academic year and all the work we have to accomplish to prepare for the onslaught of new and returning students, but also we are focused on finding the ways to best meet our students’ needs, to teach them the skills and strategies they must know and demonstrate in order to be successful, and to create learning experiences that foster learning, engagement and the enthusiasm students need to reach their dreams, goals, and passions. I am sure that for all of you these have been serious concerns as you began this new academic year.
So, how do we then as academic advisors, faculty, and administrators deal with the institutional pressures of a new academic year, the rush of new, excited, frightened, and eager new freshman, and the demands of upper classman who may all of a sudden decided that they might need to see an advisor to see if they are on track for graduation? Beyond running screaming into the night or hiding under our desks rolled in the fetal position, here are a few ideas that might help us all as we focus on this new year:
read more...I have really enjoyed the emails and phone calls I have received from many of you concerning my first attempt at “blogging.” First, because it is really cool that folks have actually taken the time to read the posting! But second, because so many people have raised some really good ideas or recommendations for future postings.
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Nancy King, past NACADA President, describes academic advising as quality conversations with students about their academic, personal, and career goals and futures. I have always loved that analogy because what we all do is truly all about conversation and our own abilities to converse with students, our colleagues across the profession, our colleagues across our institutions, and our administrators on our campuses about the value and importance of academic advising.
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