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Appalachian College Association
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Pre-Advising Program Toolkit: Home

Pre-Advising Program Tool Kit

Ryan Payne, Title III Lead Navigator/ Engagement Specialist, Union College

 

THIS TOOLKIT WILL SHOW YOU HOW TO

 

  • Build and implement a pre-advising program for first-year students. 

KEY OBJECTIVES

  • Build a pre-advising program 
  • Implement institution wide advising changes

HOW TO  IMPLEMENT THIS TOOLKIT 

  • Decide on a meeting style & platform (Phone/Zoom/ TEAMS)
  • Identify first contact time between Student & Advising (after admittance, after registering for orientation, etc)
  • Create a Pre-Advising Meeting Check List (Content to be Covered, tasks to complete before, during and after meeting, etc.)
  • Create Pre-Advising Team 
  • Create a system to split students
  • Begin meeting with students based Orientation date
  • Complete student schedule before Orientation date
  • Prepare for Orientation
  • Create folder with students’ pre-registered schedule, curriculum plans, blank weekly schedule, etc. 
  • Pair student with future professor or member of their declared department
  • Allow student to make changes to schedule at orientation – if necessary
  • Double check student schedule
  • Change student status from pre-registered to current
  • Complete steps for all incoming students

DESCRIPTION

This program was designed to be the first contact a student has with someone outside of our Admissions office. It begins when a student  is registering for Orientation. At this time they indicate a date that they plan to attend, a major, and fill in other information they need for Orientation purposes. That information along with data pertaining to their admission status (academic probation, student-athlete, ACT/SAT scores) are then relayed from the admissions office to the Advising office. A member of the Advising team then contacts the student to set up a meeting with them via Microsoft Teams. The Advising team member introduces the student to their Liberal Arts Core, their Curriculum Plan for their chosen major, makes sure they can access their Union College accounts, and answers any questions they may have about their future academic career at Union. This allows the students to see the classes required for their major and allows them to ask questions about the classes they have available to them for their first semester. During this meeting the Advising Team Member takes notes and asks questions about classes the student is interested in taking during their upcoming semester. We do our best to enroll students in the classes they choose and usually make the schedule with the student while they are in the meeting with us. At the close of the meeting the students are pre-registered, and they are ready for Orientation.

At Orientation students are assigned to a Faculty Advisor who has volunteered to work the advising leg of Orientation Day. During the sessions students will go over their schedule, talk with the faculty member about their classes, fill in a weekly schedule to see how their classes are laid out, make changes if they desire, and receive some encouragement from one of their future professors. Now this isn’t how it always happens, but we usually try to pair students with faculty members that they will have a class with in the upcoming semester, or that is within their future department. After they are satisfied with their schedule they move to the next leg of Orientation, their status is changed to “current” in Jenzabar and they are officially enrolled as Union College students. 

REFLECTION 

We began this program to face some of the challenges we were facing with Orientation time restraints and to find ways to allow for a deeper interaction between students and faculty. When we began implementing this we faced some push back from faculty who felt that we were taking the ability to advise these students away from them. We are still facing this issue now, but we are working more and more with the faculty on ways to deepen and enrich the opportunities they have to mentor and advise these students. We hope that continuing this in the future will allow the faculty more opportunities to build relationships with students as well as grow the agency the incoming freshmen have when it comes to registering for classes. We are working on moving away from doing it for them and towards guiding them through the process.