 |
|
|
| 
|
 I have mixed emotions, as 25 percent of my current position as an adviser is recruiting. I have not had to do a significant amount of recruiting—what it mostly involves is planning events for incoming students that want to visit our college and talking to families on a personal level that are visiting the college. I don't find either of these things too involved with my advising responsibilities and in fact, my advising experience often gives the folks with whom I talk a greater knowledge of how things will “be” when their child arrives to our college.Now, if my recruiting tasks increase significantly, I will have an issue with this. Simply because I will not have time to do actual advising with my students. As an adviser, I don't think I should have to travel to recruit, unless on specific occasions. I do think my knowledge can benefit the recruiting effort, but I don't think it should be the solution. Why are advisers called to do more recruiting? Because we are the ones with knowledge, that's why! Can other people gain the knowledge? Yes ... but will they make the effort? (answer to be determined ... ) ~ Kara E. Lattimer, Virginia Tech, September 2, 2005 I agree with Kara. As a newbie academic adviser in my first year, I'm not really able to opine on whether or not advisers should be involved in recruitment, but I can tell how it works, because I've only had advising gigs that involved both recruitment and advisement functions.My first advising job was in the Eugene Applebaum College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences at Wayne State University. Almost all of our specialized programs had very competitive admission, and we needed to provide a lot of advising support for prospective students. We presented monthly information sessions; responded in person, by telephone, and by e-mail to questions; and performed preliminary transcript evaluations to advise people on the extent to which they had taken prerequisite courses. For some of the programs, we even provided feedback to unsuccessful applicants. Because our programs had so many unsuccessful applicants, we frequently did “Plan B” career advising as well. We had time to do this because there were enough of us, and most true academic advising of current students was done by faculty advisers. For current students, our primary functions were periodic progress audits, graduation audits, completion of forms (especially for the many students from Ontario), issuing course overrides, and releasing registration holds. Now I am at a specialized business school offering accelerated programs primarily for working adults. Beginning in January of this year, our traditional admissions office was dismantled, a new corps of outside recruiters was hired, a call center was created, and the academic advising staff was enlarged. As advisers, we work with potential students from the moment they are willing to come to campus for an initial appointment until graduation. We also answer questions over the phone and by e-mail. We have been tasked to do this because, as Kara said, we have the information. For current students we do very little career advising because they almost always know exactly where they are going. But we are quite intrusive in our advising style and must manually enroll any students who are not following a specified cohort calendar, so advising current students takes a lot of our time. Due to our accelerated programs (six-week sessions), we have seven start dates each academic year. This enables us to spread out the work over the course of the entire year. The important point for me to make is that using academic advisers for student recruitment can only work well when there are enough advisers to perform both the recruitment functions and the traditional academic advising functions. The typical over-worked adviser with hundreds of assigned advisees at a large institution would be hard pressed to perform the recruitment function as well. ~ Marc A. Kaplan, Cleary University, September 8, 2005 Recruiting is not just a formal task of outreach to potential students. At our institution, the whole orientation program (of which advising is a major part) is about recruiting.We know that many of our students are still “shopping” and that our orientation program is just one of the experiences they will use to make their final decision about which institution they will attend in the fall. Right or wrong, it's a fact of life here. Our role as “recruiters,” then, is to do everything we can during that initial contact to help the student want to choose us. That means showing them how our type of advising will help them successfully transition into our academic and social environment. That means being friendly, supportive, and genuinely interested in them. That means providing accurate and useful information to them. We know that advising makes a huge difference in retaining first-year students into the second year, so we put our best foot forward in the summer so when we get them in the fall, we can keep them into the next year. ~ Mark Goodner, Indiana University Bloomington, September 19, 2005 Advising is advising. Helping potential students to understand their options and to determine if the institution is the correct fit for them seems to me to be the first step in retaining the students once they enroll. It's also the initial contact we may have with our latest segment of advisees: the parents. I welcome the opportunity to speak with potential enrollees. It's something we've been doing for a long time.~ Michael D. Chiteman, Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, September 23, 2005 The Mentor is published by Penn State's Division of Undergraduate Studies Available online at www.psu.edu/dus/mentor/ Privacy and Legal Statements | Copyright | © The Pennsylvania State University | All rights reserved | |
