Nov 5-Nov 9

This week, I took it upon myself to try to educate myself a bit more on several things. I spent a chunk of time reviewing some of the majors on campus and their requirements. I realized that with express advising coming up, it would be good to brush up on some of the majors and what those majors are about. There are over 150 majors on campus and the advisors at DGS consider themselves to be "general specialists" but I know that I can't even call myself that because I do not know enough about each major. I only know surface level information.

I also spent some time going back to student files from the students I worked with over the summer. I looked them up in a database to look up how they are doing in the classes I suggested and if they had chosen a different path. I also read up on the "advisor notes" or the notes that advisors write -up after they have met with a student, that were written for the students I had over the summer. I did this for around half of the students I worked with this summer.  My main reason for doing this was to examine and grade how well I advised over the summer. Advisors talk about patterns in students a lot. For example, advisors don't usually suggest a first semester freshman take Calc 1, Chem 102/103 and IB 150. They suggest this because it is usually too difficult. However, there are some students who can handle all three of those classes. I want to know more of these patterns to know what combinations of classes are appropriate or inappropriate. The only way to know these patterns is to experience them with students. After going over some of my summer students, I think I did a good job. I ran across some students whose schedule was too hard. These are the types of things that I want to take notice of.

I worked on the DGS website this week. I compiled advisor bio. information and tried to track down advisors so that I could get their information from them. I put their information in a consistent format so that soon, it will be ready to be sent to the people who are making the new website.

I spent some time reviewing old petitions again because I wanted to review petitions where the advisors all denied a petition but then the director accepted the petition (which trumps the advisor's decision) or vise versa where the advisors accepted the petition and the director denied the petition. I talked with the advisor about this and she said that the advisors do get mad when these situations come up.I also reviewed another student petition this week as a non-voting member of one of the petition committees. I am still waiting to hear if my decision to deny or accept the petition matches what the advisors decided.

Finally, I went to the staff meeting and took time after the meeting to reflect on the information from the meeting. We had the advisors from Chemical/Biomolecular Eng, Specialized Chemistry, and the Chemistry Major in Science and Letters come in to talk to us about the requirements for these programs. The same two advisors work for all three programs. These programs have very specific and unique details that are difficult to sort through and remember when working with students, which is why I had to digest some of this information after the meeting. One take-away from the staff meetings would be that every new advisor should get time each week to review majors and their requirements because there is so much to know! No wonder students get confused!


This week, I read "Solution-Focused Advising with the Undecided Student." The article was about using solution-focused therapy mixed with advising to help undecided students through the major selection process. The goal of solution-focused advising is to help students identify strengths, abilities, and interests. The authors discuss 5 different ways of utilizing solution-focused therapy in advising undecided students. They said scaling questions could be used. This is where a student places an activity on a scale from 1 to 10 in terms of enjoyment and then the advisor asks how the student could make the activity higher on the scale. Also, a miracle question can be asked, and a miracle question is one that suggests the problem is solved. The advisor can ask presuppositional questions which are questions that are somewhat open-ended and does not allow for a yes/no answer while assuming part of the answer in the presuppositional question. Advisors can be cheerleaders where they highlight students' strengths. Finally, advisors can give the student homework or tasks to do to reach their goal. 

These 5 techniques seem small but could be very effective for a student because they seem to help the student reframe their "problem" of not having a major. These also seem like techniques that should be practiced. I think these techniques are used in advising appointments when advisors have enough time to get at the meat of why a student is at DGS. When a student comes in to choose classes, an advisor does not always have enough time to talk with a student about majors. From this article, I think a take-away is that to implement these techniques, I would need to make a conscious effort to ask some important and helpful questions. Perhaps I can write some down to use as a cheat sheet for future students. 


Overall, I spent 1.5 hours reviewing some majors, 15 minutes reviewing one student's petition, 1.5 hours working on the website, 3 hours reviewing summer student files, 1 hour reviewing old petitions, 1 hour and 45 minutes in the staff meeting, 20 minutes reviewing material from the staff meeting and 1 hours blogging and reading.

Mayhall, J. & Burg, J. E. (2002). Solution-Focused advising with the undecided student. NACADA Journal, 22(1), 76-82.