One of the faculty duties I found perplexing when I started my career was that of student advising. My personal experience as an undergraduate student was less than pleasant, so I wanted to do a good job, but I wasn’t sure where to turn. My department provided me with some general forms to help guide me, and I reviewed the catalog fairly closely, but figuring out things like course rotations in other departments made me paranoid that I would fail to provide accurate advice.
I think that most students seem to want advisers who will merely “punch” their registration cards, providing them with the necessary passwords or whatever might be required for self-registration. A few seek advisers who will double as mentors, but most students seem to want the path of least resistance (and accountability). I have to say, though, that in my role as dean this creates one of the most significant headaches of my job: trouble-shooting either flawed faculty advising or wrong-headed self-advising. The stakes are high: Errors may cause students to remain in college for an extra semester or faculty members to teach directed studies as overloads.
How did you learn how to advise students? What improvements would you suggest for increasing the effectiveness of this important activity?
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9 Responses to Advising
brucedeanlarson - February 18, 2010 at 3:41 pm
I learned how to advise students the old-fashioned way: trial and error over time. Not an approach I would suggest.Academic advising can be improved by becoming familiar with the outstanding work of the National Academic Advising Association (http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/). If every university were to develop an advising syllabus for the years that a student typically spends on campus, advising would be transformed and so would student-faculty relationships, not to mentioned the improved connections students would have with the rest of the university.Advising activities would need to be more fully valued in annual reviews, as well as tenure, promotion, and post-tenure reviews, in order to enable this transformation to take place. It is worth consideration.
isanchezp - February 18, 2010 at 3:44 pm
I am an assistant Professor who advises over 50 majors at a given time. This has been the case from almost the beginning of my time here due to the stretch in my department. A good amount of them see me as a mentor rather than the “punching card” and I pride myself in having been able to handle this work without major mistakes in the past. I would point the following tips out of my experience:1. Know the general requirements of the undergraduate degree, as well as the major requirements of your departments and the departments that represent the most common double major in your own. This took me some time, but now I am able to create semester-by-semester maps for students in showing what it would take to graduate on time with all the majors, minors and requirements they want. In doing this with students in their freshman and sophomore year, I have avoided issues other colleagues have in senior year.2. Learn about all opportunities your campus offers: fellowships, grants, study abroad and so on. A good adviser not only punches cards. In my view there is bigger responsibility in understanding individual student’s needs and talents and match them as best as you can with opportunities they may have but are not aware of.3. Know your students in person, take time every semester to catch up with them and make sure you understand their goals and aspirations. You need to know the life that will be affected by any academic decisions you take. This is also related to one of the most important duties of an adviser: letter writing. If you cannot write a positive, individualized, detailed letter for any one of your advisees, you need to spend more time learning about that person.4. Be friendly but not friends, be a mentor but not a parent. Students will develop a trust bond with you and will come to you for non-academic matters. Define what is the acceptable line for you (and for your institution’s policy). If you are in the position of harmlessly advising someone (“Should I go abroad with my friends or not?”) do so, but otherwise refer students, particularly in cases of depression, grades slumps or family issues, to the appropriate counseling instances.In general, I would say, know your institution and know the individual needs of your students. When you are able to match those two things in an organic way, you will become a successful adviser
lowenstm - February 18, 2010 at 4:40 pm
Both of these responses are very useful. There is a growing literature on advising that I suspect is read more by full-time staff advisors than by faculty who advise. The NACADA Journal, which you can learn about at the reference in Comment 1, has some good material; I also like “The Mentor” published online by Penn State University — http://www.psu.edu/dus/mentor/. The most important point I would add to those alredy made is that we should think of the advisor (whether faculty or staff) as another teacher, specifically one who helps the student make a coherent whole out of a potentially fragmented curriculum by helping to identify connections, similarities and differences among methods of knowing, ways in which the entire experience can hang together. This is much more important than checking off boxes, which will become increasingly unnecessary as electronic degree audits become more widely used and more user-friendly.Helping a student makes sense of both the degree requirements and the choices that are open to him/her; finding linkages between the major and general education – these are intellectually exciting activities for both student and advisor. But they require advisors willing to think outside their disciplinary silos. I’d argue that’s something we all should be willing to do, since we require it of students.
kristamarie - February 18, 2010 at 4:57 pm
I received a Master of Science in Academic Advising at Kansas State University. They have an excellent online program for both their Graduate Certificate and Master degrees in advising! I highly recommend taking a class or two if anyone is interested in learning more about the field. The degree program is connected to the National Academic Advising Association )NACADA) and many faculty members in the degree program also serve important roles in NACADA (such as Charlie Nutt, Executive Director of NACADA). In addition to the degree program, NACADA offers a large national conference and smaller regional institutes, as well as webcasts, books, and other publications. They even have information specific to faculty advisors. Their website and clearinghouse are also chock-full of resources: http://www.nacada.ksu.edu. I promise I don’t work for NACADA or KSU! I am just a really big fan who has personally benefitted from both the organization and the school. I think that NACADA has helped to legitimize the profession and elevate the importance of advising in both staff and faculty positions.
tubby - February 18, 2010 at 5:36 pm
In our dept, we let our new tenure-track folks go the first 3/4 of their first year w/o thinking about advising. We’ll do advisor training on Mar 1 and assign these folks their first small handful of advisees after spring break, slowly building their portfolios of advisees over the next few semesters.I also don’t mean for this to sound like a commercial but in this year’s training we will for the first time use a new, inexpensive ($5) NACADA publication, “A Faculty Guide to Academic Advising.” We like that it was co-authored by an R1 English professor, an Ivy League-trained anthropologist teaching at a small liberal arts college, and a community colege professor. This shows our new faculty that people with their backgrounds take advising seriously. And preventing and dealing with the consequences of advising errors is part of our training.Also, I haven’t experienced the “just tell me what to take* phenomenon to the extent Dr. Fant reports. As #3 writes above, students seem generally to appreciate knowing the links between their goals and our curriculum. This knowledge makes the gen ed experience more meaningful to them. If you dig into the NACADA literature, you’ll see the trend is moving toward “advising as teaching.”
tess58 - February 19, 2010 at 8:58 am
I took several workshops that the University offered.
menubia - February 19, 2010 at 12:09 pm
From my experience, the following quote is a response by some students to a frustrating, impersonal and antagonistic experience with academic advising in general: “I think that most students seem to want advisers who will merely “punch” their registration cards, providing them with the necessary passwords or whatever might be required for self-registration.”Students, like all human beings, are looking for genuine connections. Being the one relationship that is most consistent in the life of the student, academic advising (whether it comes from faculty or staff) needs to be more than just a routine inhumane experience. It is the qualitative elements of the educational experience that really determine if/how students persist to graduation. It also determines how likely they are to donate to their alma mater later on in life.
saswanson - February 22, 2010 at 7:26 pm
I join those who recommend NACADA conferences and publications. I am also one who supports professional advisors in a student’s first two years and faculty advisors the second two years. Another helpful tool for all advisors is on-line degree requirements for each student.
benum - February 23, 2010 at 2:30 am
Advising should be a planned systematic approach conducted by experienced people that have studied and worked. It should not be a ‘lets see’ approach. we are dealing with peoples future and choices here. So SAGRA I think provides help with how to advise.Benu MukhopadhyayCareer DevelopmentTSiBA education