Improving Academic Advising
In reviewing their Academic Advising Topical Module results, SUNY Oswego administrators identified an opportunity to improve their advising activities to better meet student needs. To gather more details on where improvement was specifically needed, the university’s subcommittee of the campus retention committee, the academic interventions group, invited a sample of students from all class years as well as the entire faculty and staff populations to complete a survey on their advising experiences. Students noted that some advisers lacked the time or knowledge to suggest relevant experiences like internships, study abroad, and career opportunities. Faculty advisors indicated that more training and better access to resources were needed to support students experiencing academic difficulty. Further, the faculty also reported wanting a lighter advising load in order to provide more individualized advising.
The academic interventions group used the NSSE advising module results paired with the campus follow-up survey as leverage for the creation of two new student academic support specialist positions on campus. These two professionals meet with “at-risk” students to help ensure they are staying on track by providing them information about resources like tutoring, counseling, and study skills workshops.
Members of the academic interventions group also developed a set of five “advisement boot camp” sessions—two “basic training” sessions and three sessions on advanced topics. Members reached out to some of the campus’s “super advisors” for suggestions of topics to be covered in each session. The provost’s office incentivized attendance at three of the events with a dinner and tickets to a campus performance following the training sessions. To encourage attendance, the academic interventions group used a flier with a catchy logo, emails, campus announcements and digital signage distributed to the faculty, advisement coordinators, and department chairs.
The two basic boot camp sessions, offered at two different times to fit attendees’ schedules, introduced attendees to the campus resources available to help them and also provided them with a list of hyperlinks they could bookmark in their browsers to get directly to the issue at hand. The sessions were informal, with some lecture style presentations, but participants reported that the most useful part of the boot camp was the interaction between colleagues who had good tips and excellent questions for each other.
Similar to the basic session, the advanced topics session was offered multiple times to provide scheduling flexibility. This session gave advisors a great deal of information on calculating GPA’s, advice to share with students on “undoing a bad semester,” transfer student issues, graduation problems, campus resources for career services, international education, major exploration, and student support services. Facilitators ended these sessions with case studies that advisors worked on in small groups and on which they then presented their perspectives. The exchange between advisers sharing how they dealt with difficult situations and how they worked through the issues was one of the more valuable aspects of the sessions.
The academic intervention group members undertook an assessment of these sessions that showed advisors were ready to employ more effective practices. SUNY Oswego plans to continue the boot camp series. They will repeat both the NSSE advising module and the internal survey as measurements for growth and ways to continue to improve their advising efforts.
