Tag: advising

Conversations on Craft and Career: Guiding Passionate Students

This post discusses the challenges faced by professors and students in non-career-focused majors, who often encounter pressure to prioritize economic returns. It highlights the importance of supporting these students in pursuing their passions while managing potential regrets. The author emphasizes the enduring value of craft and its impact on cultural legacy.

photo of woman wearing white long sleeves and black pants while sitting on floor looking pensive
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It’s true: there are still some professors and students who choose fields of study and complete majors that don’t solely open career pathways. It’s true: faculty and students in these majors must withstand the relentless and usually unsophisticated pressures from parents and peers to resist academic preparations aimed primarily at a short-term return on economic investment. It’s true: faculty and students in these majors feel marginalized and devalued for their calling, which is viewed as irrelevant and archaic, or worse, irresponsible and regressive.

For mentors and advisors in these areas, the challenge remains: how does one begin an effective conversation with students who are interested in educational opportunities outside the narrowing focus on career preparation?

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Vocational Calendars and Teaching the Giftedness of Time

The author reflects on the challenges faced in advising for students, noting a disconnect between student expectations and meaningful discussions about their futures. Drawing from Rowan Williams’s ideas on the significance of time, the author advocates for teaching students to appreciate time’s giftedness, aligning academic rhythms with their religious calendars and broader vocational paths.

symmetrical view of railway through a wasteland
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I have just finished a round of appointments with many of my first-year students and undeclared advisees to help them review their progress and pick classes for next semester. Even as I am blessed with students who are polite, eager, and diligent, some of their expectations create obstacles to having more meaningful conversations about their vocational arc. They often want to prioritize a more convenient, linear pathway—one aimed at a credential they are just beginning to understand. I would prefer to spend time with them discussing a more holistic trajectory: how they prepared in the past for their lives as students, what they are exploring in this present moment, and how they are creating foundations for their futures. Given this tension, this most recent round of advising conversations felt to me like boilerplate sessions of prescriptive compliance.

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Embracing Uncertainty: Parallels Between the Scientific Method and Vocational Discernment

We are exploring how to frame conversations with students about vocation in terms that they will recognize from their scientific training. By connecting the language of scientific process with vocational discernment, we hope to foster deeper conversations with students about their callings and how their knowledge, strengths, and interests might align in unique ways with the needs of their communities.

(Austin) I recently hosted a career panel for our science majors at my college. During this panel, students had the opportunity to hear from fantastic individuals who were doing exciting and fulfilling work in careers like healthcare diagnostics, pharmaceutical management, and biotech research and development. The students heard compelling stories about the winding and fortuitous journeys that led the panelists to their current vocations. Since the panelists were alumni of the college and had been in the same position as my students a decade ago, I was excited about how current students might gain confidence in pursuit of their own unique and creative paths.

After the panel, I held a feedback session for my students. I anticipated their excitement about potential careers and where they might be called. However, they seemed more nervously overwhelmed than awestruck. The sentiment in the room was summarized by a student who said,

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Belonging and Retention: It’s Not Rocket Science

A recent article in the Chronicle offers what may be a needed reminder about the importance of advising and the role it plays in fostering a sense of belonging for students.

A recent article in the Chronicle offers what may be a needed reminder about the importance of advising and the role it plays in fostering a sense of belonging for students. Aaron Basko, who previously worked at Salisbury University and is now assistant assistant vice president for enrollment management at the University of Lynchburg, wonders whether we have gotten student success “completely backward.” In our efforts to apply “complex technocratic approaches” to the problem of student retention, Basko writes, we forget to consider what makes students stay.

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Advising is Teaching, and Other Truisms

In a recent piece on the AAC&U blog, Isabel Roche gently admonished liberal arts colleges and their faculty for not making good on the promise of an integrated student experience.

Holistic mentoring—the kind of mentoring that ideally involves supporting students in the discernment of their vocations—is sometimes framed as a return to an older model of advising, one that was traditionally under the purview of faculty. Simply put, to borrow the subtitle from William James’ Pragmatism, holistic mentoring is “A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.” Yet just as often it is celebrated as something new and distinctive, a welcome development over previous modes of advising that were prescriptive and often perfunctory.

Considered historically, the shifts in advising involved a related shift in personnel, that is, who is doing the advising and for what purpose. In many contexts, faculty have ceded advising to student affairs personnel and others. Advising occurs in various silos across campus, sometimes to the detriment of students. And, as Isabel Roche pointed out recently on the AAC&U Liberal Education blog, this leaves unfulfilled one of the important promises of the liberal arts college (See “Advising is Teaching. Now Is the Time to Make Good on its Promise”). 

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Office Hours and Fear of the Unknown

My experience with office hours as an undergraduate can best be described as “from revelatory to humiliating.”… Now, after 15 years of sitting on the professor’s side of the desk for office hours, I still don’t have a good answer for just how accessible we are supposed to be.

Faculty Office Hours, or FOH: May become addicting!

A story that aired on NPR back in October about college students and office hours never quite gained the traction I thought it would. The highlight of the story for me was the discussion of a satirical video, produced by Arizona State University, warning students of the dangers of FMOOWMP: Fear of Meeting One on One with my Professor.  “Finally!” I thought, a lighthearted way to break the ice with my students and encourage them to take advantage of those big blue blocks labelled “Office Hours” on my posted schedule.

The story aired on a Wednesday and I decided that the FMOOWMP video was going to be my opening for both of my classes the following morning. As funny as the video is, it certainly needs some qualifiers if the joyful ending it envisions is ever going to be realized. Yes, office hours are good and can make all the difference in the world. But, after giving this a little more thought, I think the whole concept of office hours can benefit from a little unpacking.

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