The Best Advice

I've just put my advising sign-up sheet on the wall outside my office for students to sign up for their Fall advising sessions. I meet with each of my advisees to go over their plans for the next semester and generally check in with how things are going.

When I first meet a new advisee, usually as a sophomore, the first thing I say is that the degree they are working towards is their degree. By this I mean that they can put together the courses they would like to take, the courses they are interested in, as they fulfill the degree requirments. My role is to give advice as to whether the choices they make are the best choices for now and for the future. For example, in the short term I don't want my advisees to overload themselves with too many courses requiring field placements or labs in one semester. In the long term it's important to think about the things that future employers might be looking for in a transcript or cv.

With the double major requirement for Education majors it's really important to keep an eye on the sequence of courses in each major. To do this we have the students write out their 4-year plan on sticky Post-its on two manilla folders as in the picture above. We deliberately keep the process low-tech so that changes can be easily made anywhere and at any time. It's a really good feeling to open the folders and see how everything fits together too. There's an Advising web-page that students can use to put together their 4-year plan and keep track of everything else such as the required 60 hours of public school classroom experience prior to student teaching.