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How do you know that you have made a difference in the education of your advisees?

Chad Kimmel, Shippensburg University

Editor's Note: This article was selected as an honorable mention in the Mentor's sixth annual Academic Advising Writing Competition. Dr. Chad Kimmel is a proud product of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education where he earned his B.A. in sociology from Millersville University and his M.A. in sociology from Indiana University. He completed his Ph.D. in sociology at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 2004. Completing the circle, Dr. Kimmel is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology/Anthropology at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania where he teaches courses on violence, deviance, criminology, juvenile delinquency, and introduction to sociology. He recently authored his department's winning 2006 Advising Excellence Award application. Dr. Kimmel can be reached at cmkimm@ship.edu or 717-477-1706.

I am both in love with and intimidated by advising. My love stems from the opportunity I have to interact and build relationships with students outside of class. Gone are the cinderblock walls and the headache-producing, overhead fluorescent lights that frame the classroom climate. Here, in my office, with a century old mantle clock keeping time on the shelf above and a framed oil painting of a young mallard duck on the wall—the artist my mother, the clock itself a family heirloom—I enter into a dialogue with my advisees about their interests, their course work, their passions. Welcome to my advising session. Yet I often find myself pausing before I speak. With pressures of assessment and accountability rising, I wonder about and sometimes second-guess the direction of my talks with advisees. Coming to terms with what the students want to know, what they need to know, and relaying what I wished I knew when I was in their position can make scheduled interactions resemble a cooking recipe, especially as a handful of advisees wait patiently outside the door for their turn at thirty minutes. Did I emphasize the internship enough? Have they met all of the prerequisites? Do their courses reflect their interests? Do they have room for a minor? These are some of the questions that I replay in my mind long after the advising session ends.

As I negotiate these and other tensions, however, I am, on occasion, able to catch a glimpse of growth in my advisees, a type of maturity that too easily escapes measurement. Differences emerge and my perceptions of my advisees change. The student who occasionally glanced at me as we sat together, the one who paid more attention to her scheduling papers and cell phone, holding them like life preservers in a sea of unfamiliarity, now sits upright and directs our conversations with commitment and a renewed faith in the power of eye contact. It is comforting to see my advisees wrestling with some of the ideas and themes of our previous talks. They now have questions of their own; they express interest in knowing the stories of others who have graduated before them in hopes of finding a crumb of experience that they could perhaps replicate; and they reveal to me a new seriousness that had not been seen before, a posture of urgency about a future that is getting closer and closer to the present.

I consider this change in energy, in devotion to self, as one of my many advising rewards. It is at this point that I take notice of the difference that I may have had in the education of my advisees.

Indeed, what I occasionally witness in some of my advisees is a pure transformation in the social and intellectual self. This biographical adjustment, as I have seen, manifests itself in the voices of my advisees, particularly in their displays of confidence in thought and opinion. These marks of change surface, for example, in discussions of career interests. Most students who have had an internship are better prepared at formulating their thoughts on what it is they now like and dislike. Internships provide students with stages where they can test their voices. The once passive student now sits with pride as he describes how much he enjoyed the experience. While I would love to take credit for these positive changes, good advising is only part of the explanation—the overall educational experience should be structured to provide a variety of opportunities for such expression. This is the role of the institution. My role as an adviser and as a teacher is to provide guidance and an outlet for advisees and students to practice and fine-tune their expressions. I may have facilitated the internship experience, but I certainly cannot take the credit for its power to transform students. Let us not forget, however, that students must want to change and grow. As advisers, we can only encourage and invite them.

Nonetheless, we can never be certain of how much power the advising process has in explaining positive changes in a student's education. But by focusing our attention on student transformations, as I have outlined above, advisers can get a better feel for the impact that they are having in the lives of their students.

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Published in The Mentor on February 1, 2007
On the Web at www.psu.edu/dus/mentor/
Copyright 2007 Center for Excellence in Academic Advising
Division of Undergraduate Studies
The Pennsylvania State University