Tag: academic advising

Breaking Vocational Barriers and Creating Student-Ready Institutions

Many students encounter barriers in higher education due to systemic barriers rather than personal inadequacies. Faculty and staff are urged to redesign courses and support systems to foster student readiness. Collaborative efforts between institutions and communities are essential for enabling student success and creating transformative educational environments that honor all learners’ vocational journeys.

Every year, some students have their dreams derailed after they fail gateway courses or are unable to secure admission into selective undergraduate or graduate programs. We—as faculty, staff, and administrators—sometimes assume the barrier is students’ ability and ask if they are college-ready. Tia Brown McNair and her colleagues remind us to flip the question and ask if the systems we created are student-ready. What if collectively, we are the problem?

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Coping with Loss: Supporting Students when They Navigate Unforeseen Academic Changes

Joseph, a first-generation honors student, struggled in his first-year chemistry course, earning a C, which led to doubt about pursuing medicine. Many students face similar pressures regarding GPA and vocational goals. Institutions must proactively support students experiencing academic difficulties, emphasizing vocational exploration and mental well-being resources to alleviate distress and promote resilience.

overwhelmed young man against trigonometry calculations
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Joseph was a high-achieving first-generation student who graduated with honors from his high school. He aspired to pursue medicine but suddenly found himself struggling in his first-year chemistry course. At the end of the fall term, he earned a C. Learning had come naturally to him during high school, requiring little time outside of school. He now needed to learn to study independently but was unsure how to retain information. Writing lab reports was also new to him. Resolved to improve, he met with a tutor during the first half of the spring semester, but when he looked at his midterm grades, his stomach dropped. After all his work, he still had a C. Panic set in as he doubted his ability to pursue medicine. He also remembered he needed to register for fall courses the next week. Unsure how to proceed and apprehensive about his future, he decided it was time to meet with his advisor.

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Closing the Gap: Integrating Vocation into Second-Year Initiatives

Many colleges lack support programs for second-year students, leaving them feeling isolated and without direction. Institutions are encouraged to integrate vocational exploration into academic advising and provide tailored support. Initiatives such as high-impact practices, applied learning, cohort events, and mentoring opportunities can enhance social connections and address students’ needs for purpose and career direction during their critical second year.

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When sophomores return to most colleges after the summer, they often discover less support than they received as first-year students. Half of institutions do not offer second-year initiatives to meet students’ needs. Given the scarcity of time and dollars, some institutions are simply relieved that second-year students have returned and then shift their focus almost exclusively to the newly arrived first-year students.

The absence of second-year programs leaves many students in their second year feeling invisible and isolated. In response, many institutions have embedded second-year initiatives into academic advising, career exploration and planning, early alert systems, leadership programs, and back-to-school events. Sophomore retreats, mentoring, and residence life initiatives have also become popular.

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Happy Global Academic Advising Week: Let’s Celebrate and Integrate Vocation

Global Advising Week celebrates NACADA’s role in enhancing student success through academic advising. As advisors create inclusive environments for students to explore their educational and vocational goals, they can also address barriers to engagement. Intentional integration of vocation in advising empowers all students, fostering reflection and collaboration to enrich their academic journeys.

This week higher education celebrates Global Advising Week from April 27 – May 3, in recognition of the formation of NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising. Formally chartered on May 2, 1979, NACADA exists to advance student success through academic advising in higher education. Since NACADA’s inception, academic advisors have created inclusive spaces for students to discuss their holistic goals and educational purposes.

Now a global professional community of practice, NACADA leaders ground advising in key competencies, shared values, standards of practice, and a teaching mindset that unites the field. Whether they serve as faculty advisors, full-time primary-role advisors, or champions of the cause, NetVUE members should celebrate advising this week—for all the ways that it provides unique opportunities to deepen students’ vocational learning.

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Exploring Vocation in the Health Professions: Promoting Longitudinal Discernment

As students gain clarity about their vocational choice(s), we must create a longitudinal path that provides opportunities for students to revisit vocational discernment throughout their college experience.

A series of posts about a collaborative project at the University of Dayton to develop courses, programs, and opportunities for undergraduate vocational discernment in the health professions, including a first-year course, “Discover Health and Medicine.”

I am always amused when I’m asked if I work in the field in which I earned my undergraduate degree. The answer is no, and in fact, I go out of my way to explain to students my meandering path to my current vocation. When I reflect upon my experiences, I accept that had I made different choices as an undergraduate, my path may have been straighter and more efficient, but I would not be the same person that I am today.

In my initial blog post in January, I shared my colleagues’ and my plan to develop a Discover Health & Medicine track for students who express interest in a career in the health professions but had not been initially accepted into a traditional pre-health major. Our two-semester, first-year class will incorporate an intentionally extended vocational exploration and discernment process. For those students who are interested in exploring a vocation in the health professions, this class will teach the skills of discernment and provide tools and resources to use in setting goals.

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Queering our Advising of LGBTQIA+ Students

Queering our approach to advisement helps students cultivate critical dispositions and build not only resilience but also resistance to injustice, thus creating the conditions of transformative possibility for flourishing within our institutions and beyond.

In my last post, I suggested how we might better educate ourselves as advisors and support our queer students as they explore and prepare for the world of work after graduation. Many of these strategies focused on helping students navigate the homo- and transphobic contexts of work. In this post, I consider a different angle by highlighting queer theory’s disruptive potential for our students’ academic journeys and vocational discernment. Queering our approach to advisement helps students cultivate critical dispositions and build not only resilience but also resistance to injustice, thus creating the conditions of transformative possibility for flourishing within our institutions and beyond.

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Supporting LGBTQIA+ Students in the Pursuit of Meaningful Work

As educators and advisors, we best serve our queer students not by adopting a one-size-fits-all kind of approach but rather by helping them understand and articulate the relationship between their sexual and gender (and other intersecting) identities and their emerging and evolving professional interests.

A few years ago, one of my queer-identified students shared with me some resume advice they had received from a colleague in our career center: not to include their internship at an LGBTQIA+ advocacy organization because potential employers would respond negatively. This advice confused and frustrated the student. They were out, and their queer identity had played an important part in their vocational discernment. This internship had reinforced their sense of calling by clarifying and strengthening their emerging professional commitment to work in the queer community after graduation. Not surprisingly, this student wanted to know what I thought they should do.

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Back to basics: holistic mentoring in times of crisis

This current moment of crisis challenges us to stop and re-consider our old assumptions and practices. By thinking in terms of holistic mentoring that emphasizes students’ larger sense of meaning and purpose, NetVUE institutions have already moved into a new paradigm. This is a good time to review what we already know to be true about vocation-centered mentoring, and to ask how we can continue to support students using online formats.

In a recent essay in Inside Higher Ed, Eric R. White, associate dean for advising emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and former president of NACADA, called upon his colleagues to begin to re-imagine a new model for academic advising, one that takes into account the realities that higher education will inevitably confront in the coming years. As with the shift to on-line teaching this spring, academic advising also had to pivot to relying upon online communication forms. White argues that such a shift was almost “second nature” to many, given that in recent years “academic advising was one of the first higher education endeavors to embrace technology as a way to supplement its work.”

The sanguine picture White paints may not align with the reality for many advisors this spring. Being comfortable with online technology is one thing but getting students to respond to offers for help and support is another. During a NetVUE-sponsored Zoom gathering in April, people described texting with individual students as an effective way to simply inquire about how they were doing, their family situation, and overall well-being. At another meeting, Student Affairs administrators described the importance of getting in touch with every student over those initial weeks of anxiety, bewilderment, and grief—an “all hands on deck” endeavor. I came away from those Zoom meetings reaffirmed about the passion and commitment of NetVUE colleagues from across the country. Even in a state of exhaustion, they operate from a deep sense of calling; they are “nimble” because they know how to stay connected to fundamentals.

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Beyond Problem-Solving: The Mystery of Mentoring for Vocation

What is the difference between traditional academic advising and mentoring for vocational discernment? Is the latter simply an extension of the former, a way of advising “the whole student”? Or is mentoring for vocation constitutionally different enough to warrant its own set of reflections?  Continue reading “Beyond Problem-Solving: The Mystery of Mentoring for Vocation”