Academic advising is changing at UAA. Image by StartupStockPhotos from Pixabay.
Some students may not know that different colleges within UAA have historically done advising differently.
For example, students within the College of Engineering meet with a professional advisor early on in their college career before moving on to a faculty advisor specific to their degree. Meanwhile, students within the Community and Technical College primarily only use professional advisors. Some colleges and degree programs have mandatory advising at certain points in a student’s career, while some do not.
This semester, however, some aspects of advising have been restructured between colleges. Advisors will no longer report directly to deans, and first year advisors will be incorporated into different colleges.
“For me, advising is about relationships,” said Jenny McNulty, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, “and I want our students to have a relationship with an advisor that lasts through their career.”
McNulty highlighted a lack of consistency in advising across campus and students being transferred between multiple advisors as a weak point in the previous advising system. She said that this new system will help address those inconsistencies, but students may not immediately notice the change.
Raymond Weber, the dean of the UAA Community and Technical College, said that the new advising structure will hopefully even out the load that advisors take on at different colleges.
Weber said that turnover rates with advisors previously could be an issue and that it took time to train new advisors to fill those slots. Weber said he hopes that this can be addressed in the new system as well.
“Some more robust training process, I think, is a way to help mitigate that. If there is a turnover, someone can jump in more quickly.”
For colleges with a small number of professional advisors, such as the College of Engineering, the change is a chance to take some pressure off.
“Right now we kind of have to scramble around [...] because we only have two people,” said Kendrick Mock, the dean of the College of Engineering. Mock said he sees this new system as an opportunity to provide more resiliency to advising.
Each dean highlighted that there was a high amount of value in advising and that a lot of the strength comes in their ability to connect to and care about students.
Weber also noted that this new system isn’t set in stone, and will likely change as people figure out what does and doesn’t work.
“The transition is far from over.”
The Northern Light will be doing follow up stories about UAA’s new advising system.
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