Academic advisers are among the most important resources available to St. Bonaventure students. Academic faculty members serve as fine advisers and help students navigate through the sometimes confusing registration processes and their degree audits, preparing them to move effectively through the Bonaventure system and into the professional world.
Of course, some students fail to utilize this resource and some advisers are more than willing to accept the lack of interest. Some advisers just approve students for registration without a meeting and send them on their merry ways. This stems from a failure of understanding what constitutes being a good adviser or a good advisee. It isn’t how the system should work.
The Student Success and Retention Committee is working to repair this problem with new sets of advising guidelines for students and advisers. The proposals recently made the rounds and won the approval of the Student Government Association and the Faculty Senate.
Students and faculty should take them seriously and realize their significance.
The new guidelines lay out commonsense expectations for both students and faculty advisers. Students take the initiative and advisers stand willing and ready to help.
Chris Brown, coordinator of Residential Education and Housing, said the guidelines sprung from the lack of a clear definition of a good adviser.
“Many of the faculty on the Student Success and Retention Committee mentioned that there is not a lot of definition given to the advising role,” Brown said in an email. “We also noticed that many other schools have sections on their website dedicated to explaining advising to prospective and current students.”
According to the draft document, advisers are expected to take action beyond clearing students for registration. In addition to helping with class selection, good advising includes discussing career options. In turn, students are expected to take the first step in using the resource.
Nancy Casey, chair of the committee, said the proposals aren’t a response to any particular failures of the system but a tool to assist prospective students, current students and new faculty members. The proposal encourages students and advisers to discuss things beyond simply getting through Clare College and major requirements.
“I don’t want to just work with my advisees and tell them what classes to take,” Casey a professor of education, said. “I want to talk about their careers and their goals and their aspirations. It’s much more rewarding as an adviser when you have advisees who want to engage in that kind of academic, intellectual conversation how what they’re doing as a college student is going to help them reach their goals.”
The draft guidelines are a positive step in properly defining what the relationship between advisers and students should be. The committee correctly feels that there should be more to the dialogue beyond approving for registration.
This concrete set of guidelines, eventually set to be displayed online, will be valuable to students and faculty. They inform students what good advising looks like, allowing them to analyze performance and make appropriate evaluations. In turn, it lays out what is expected of students and the steps they need to take to ensure academic advising is being used to its best capacity.
Take these guidelines to heart; they will ultimately make sure that both students and faculty can maximize the benefit of the adviser-student relationship.
This editorial represents the opinion of The Bona Venture staff.
