It’s advising season again.
Faculty inboxes are flooded with meeting requests as they try their best to help students prepare for registration. With the amount of students needing advising assistance, there are multiple factors that contribute to this stress.
The Echo Editorial Board believes the advising process should build a relationship between students and faculty. This relationship should continue to develop throughout the year, not only once per year.
Large departments like Business — which has approximately 350 students — must outsource to other faculty members to assist with advising. Trina Hartman, director of academic advising, advises the freshman and sophomore business majors.
Hartman said a contributing factor to advising stress is that faculty advisers are not trained in department-specific advising.
“We used to have [advising] training sessions,” Hartman said. “My goal is to get back into having more relationships with the faculty as far as advising, and make sure they understand the tools.”
To account for the amount of students in the Business Department, Jody Hirschy, associate dean of business and executive director of graduate programs in leadership, is in the process of searching for an additional staff member — a part-time student adviser. This position will primarily serve freshman and sophomore business students. As business students reach their junior year, they will transition into utilizing a more specialized faculty adviser to cater to their specific needs.
“During that small window we call advising, there are only so many hours in a day,” Hirschy said. “That ensures that everybody gets the information they need, have access to the people they need, can get their registration code and actually get registered for classes in a timely fashion.”
For other departments with fewer students, like Communication, faculty are focused on building a relationship with, and addressing the specific concerns of, their students.
Julie Borkin, assistant professor of communication, sees the advising process as a collaborative effort between faculty and students.
“I think good advising means that we’re asking more questions that give students a chance to reflect [on] what's resonating, what they're resisting, what they're dreaming about, that they maybe haven't talked to anyone about, and how that fits with their identity and, obviously, their plan of study,” Borkin said. “But it isn't a quick fix, so I believe that good advising is more than just that appointment.”
The optimal solution would be to address academic needs in a manner similar to other issues at Taylor — by focusing on the whole person. Discussing the strengths, weaknesses and goals of each student can help advisers place students in classes that will work best for them.
For this to be possible, additional advisers must be available to students. Students working in conjunction with a general adviser and their designated major adviser would yield happier students and relieve stress from already overworked faculty members.
This solution is a two-way street: for advisers to help students, students must seek a relationship with their adviser to cultivate understanding and a mutual goal.
We believe that advising should be more than a meeting and should inspire a relationship between faculty and students.
