Academic Advising
Academic advising is a complex role that has multiple facets and responsibilities – it can be key to student retention, persistence and progress. An academic advisor serves as a significant contact person within the university who helps students feel more connected to the institution. This sense of belonging and connectedness is directly related to the student’s decision to remain in school. The purpose of academic advising is to help students explore their life goals, their vocational goals, their choices of academic programs, and their course and scheduling choices. Among MUM’s Essential Learning Outcomes, “Problem Solving,” is most developed through the advising partnership.
Problem Solving: Students can design and implement strategies to answer open-ended questions or achieve desired goals. They can
- Define problems in context
- Identify potential solutions and their consequences
- Implement solutions and evaluate the outcomes
Advisor Responsibilities: What advisors are expected to do
- Advise new students soon after arriving on campus to articulate long and short-term goals and select courses that will help them achieve those goals
- Introduce your department’s academic program to new majors
- Meet at least once with students each semester, to discuss challenges they face, help them assess what caused them, what can be done to resolve them and how to avoid them in the future.
- Advise students in spring to provide guidance in course selection and compare their curriculum plan to their personal and career goals
- Advise students if they wish to drop or add courses to make sure their choices will fit into their overall academic plan
- Advise students when they are on academic alert or warning (GPA below 2.0 for undergraduates or 3.0 for graduate students).
- Ensure that students fulfill their general education requirements in a timely way
- Advise students regarding internship options
- Convey career information so students are aware of career options for their major
- Maintain an information page on the department’s website that
- Describes what a degree in your program prepares students to do
- Describes what graduates of your program have done
- Includes a list of your top graduates, who they are and where they are working or in graduate school
- Survey students for feedback on advising