In the fall of 2017, a small percentage of incoming freshmen will be introduced to an advisement pilot program created by the Review of Academic Advisement Planning Committee.
After seeing the low student satisfaction about the faculty advisement on the Oswego State campus, Mehran Nojan and Douglas Pippin, co-chairs of RAAP, looked into the flaws of the current advisement model.
RAAP is a group of faculty from around campus appointed by Oswego State President Deborah Stanley to create a new academic advisement model. The goal of the committee is to help students succeed in going through their degree programs as smoothly as possible.
Last spring, RAAP presented their ideas to Faculty Assembly and Student Association. They received positive feedback from both groups and adjusted their proposal based on the comments received before they submitted it to Stanley. Stanley recently approved their proposal for the new advisement model pilot program to begin in the fall of 2017.
One new feature of the pilot program includes having separate advisors; a professional academic advisor and a faculty mentor.
The professional academic advisor will know the ins and outs of degree program requirements and the different resources across campus. After looking at different potential advisement models, members of RAAP believe that the best way to help students is to have a professional academic advisor.
“The goal is the ability to funnel students to the right place to go in other areas on campus,” Pippin said. “Somebody who could put them in touch with people in financial aid, registrar and even housing, in ways that other faculty are not familiar with.”
Other faculty members’ roles will evolve to mentorship. The goal is for them add to the quality of the degree students are receiving.
“We are trying to give faculty a little bit of room to run with what they are trained in,” Pippin said. “Also hopefully to open up more opportunities for students in anything related to professional development.”
According to Nojan, the program will take the rest of the fall and the spring semester to be set up. Incoming freshmen from the class of 2021 in different departments across campus will start the pilot program next fall.
“Since we need to see if this works for Oswego, we need to pilot it,” Nojan said. “We are thinking of maybe hiring one new professional academy advisor with 150 and a maximum 200 [students].”
In 2019, RAAP hopes to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the program to eventually project the model to every department on campus. RAAP has not yet decided which academic departments will be the first to pilot the program.
Throughout the SUNY campuses and even the different departments on the Oswego State campus, there is no set model for advisement.
“There are so many different ways of doing things on campus with different levels of success,” Pippin said. “We wanted to take the best out of all of those and try to apply them more broadly to improve student advisement overall.”
Getting student feedback on the pilot program is an important topic that has been discussed in RAAP since the committee was formed.
One idea for receiving feedback is to send out Google surveys to students after they meet with their advisor. The survey will include questions about the meeting, including if the advisor was helpful to the student and if all their questions were all answered.
They also hope student retention numbers will be impacted and will be an accurate measurement of the success of the program.
After receiving feedback and adjusting the program, they hope that in four to six years the whole campus will have transitioned over to the new model.
“Our approach is go slowly, go deliberately, assess the implementation, make corrections and then see where we can go,” Nojan said.
Sophomore Ryan Cobane is excited about the needed change in advisement, but is upset that he will miss it.
“I think the program is going to be successful,” Cobane said. “I wish I would be here to see it and benefit from it.”
Although current students will not formally be affected by this change in advisement, they may be informally affected by individual advisors due to training received from the workshops and sessions.
RAAP worked with more than 40 faculty members through workshops and sessions facilitated by the education advisory board.
“I was really pleased whenever I attended sessions, everybody was really enthusiastic working on this,” Pippin said. “It was fun to see that there was so much interest in finding new ways to change something that has been the same for faculty for so long.”
