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Field Experience Report Nicole Ponticorvo Rutgers University

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Overview As a field experience intern for the Office of Academic Services, I have a gained another perspective on the student experience. Unlike my work as a Hall Director and Student Life and Orientation intern, my experience with academic advising has exposed me to a very integral aspect of higher education that pushed me outside of my comfort zone. Working in an office with three Deans and two support staff has also helped me adapt to a new type of office structure. Whereas my other internships were less structured in terms of time spent in the office, the life of an academic advisor is much more clear-cut and structured through appointments with students. Through observing different Deans in advising appointments, conducting workshops, interacting with staff, and conducting my own advising appointments, I learned about what it means to work in academic services and how my personality and skill sets fit into this unit. My primary motivation for pursuing this field experience was to gain exposure to academic advising, so that I could better understand how advising parlays into orientation and first year programs. Since I would like to pursue a career in orientation, I believe it is important that I understand how professionals approach academic advising, particularly for new first year and transfer students. By starting off my experience as an observer, I was able to discern the different approaches that Deans take when they advise students. Whereas some Deans take a more pragmatic approach, others strongly utilize counseling techniques. Regardless of approach, I learned that academic advising can and does allow the advisor to give advice to students; however, the ultimate decision as to which class to take or which major to choose is always left up to the student. While I observed, I would often see students coming in to literally get answers: Whats an easy class I can take? Should I major in Psychology even though my parents want me to be a medical doctor? Should I graduate early? Should I take chemistry at my community

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college in the summer? Students would come in with these questions and many more, merely wanting answers. In this sense, I witnessed numerous students who were following external formulas and clearly not close to self-authorship. It was interesting to observe how Deans would handle those situations. While there were times where they would give students clear-cut advice regarding a particular subject, there were other times when they would engage in counseling and probe the student to try to help the student arrive at a decision, which I believe is much more helpful to the students developmental journey. Residence Hall and Online Tools Workshops Through my project of coordinator residence hall registration workshops for first year School of Arts and Sciences students, I learned just how important outreach is to the world of advising. Since students at Rutgers are not required to see an advisor, some do not seek out the assistance until they are in academic trouble. Of course, there are many students who are proactive and seek out advising early on in order to best plan out their college career. Nevertheless, many do not. Therefore, it is crucial that advising meets students where they are. Advising workshops that occur directly in the residence halls are ideal ways to bring advising to students in their homes. While I am a bit conflicted in terms of how bringing advising workshops to residence halls can be viewed as spoon feeding students, I do also acknowledge that some students may never be exposed to this resource otherwise. If a student attends a residence hall advising workshop and then decides to one day make an actual appointment to see an academic advisor, then I think that our goal would be achieved. From personal experience and observation from working with students, I have found that Rutgers is indeed a very challenging place to navigate. Therefore, in such a large and complex place, it is vital to pursue every opportunity to expose students to academic advising resources.

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By compiling feedback from the Deans who facilitated the residence hall workshops, I also learned that it is extremely important to assess the value of such initiatives. While some workshops were extremely successful with over 80 attendees, others were not as successful with just about 10 attendees, most of which were uninterested. The major factor impacting the success of these workshops was Housing and Residence Life staff buy-in. Since my role was coordinating these workshops, I communicated with the Hall Directors and Residence Life Coordinators/Educators in order to schedule the workshops, provide flyers, and determine who the staff contact was going to be for the Dean on the day of the workshop. For the majority of the workshops, staff members were fabulous. They posted flyers, provided food and even games during the workshops, and, most importantly, spread the word to residents about the workshops. On the other hand, there were a handful of buildings that, in some way, dropped the ball in terms of garnering student interest and, as a result, few students showed up and even fewer showed interest. This result taught me the importance of collaboration in academic advising, particularly with regards to residence hall outreach and programming. When residence hall staff members do not help foster enthusiasm for advising programming, students do not participate. Residence hall staff have a great deal of influence when it comes to the success of programs in their buildings, and, in evaluating the attendance and level of success of each workshop, it was clear that the most successful and engaging workshops occurred when residence life staff took an interest in advertising and encouraging students to care about the topic. In the future, I think it will be crucial to communicate the importance of residence hall staff members buy in to the supervisors of resident assistant staff in order to ensure that these workshops truly benefit students. With regards to my other project facilitating online tools workshops, I learned that it is important to present advising and academic planning in such a way that speaks to todays

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students through social media and online tools. In developing and presenting online tool workshops that give students an overview of various internet sites and platforms that can help their academic planning process, I learned the importance of empowering students to track their own academic progress, and one way they can do that is through the online tools that I presented in my workshops. By facilitating these workshops, I learned that students really do see me as an expert, whereas I see myself as a novice. I also learned that if I comport myself with confidence and present the material with conviction, they will take me seriously. When I first starting preparing for these workshops, I did not think that students would find the information extremely useful because I thought that most of it was pretty obvious. To my surprise, when I actually did facilitate the workshops, I found that students really appreciated and needed the guidance in order to navigate the online tools that can help them better plan their schedules for course registration. The only aspect of these workshops that was disappointing was the low level of attendance. Each of my workshops had an average of five participants. While we had flyers and emailed out to all first years through the list-serve, the interest was still low. In order to help boost attendance, I suggested that the workshops be advertised and even conducted in the residence halls in order to make them more accessible to students. Currently, I took the initiative to develop an assessment survey of what students felt was helpful about the workshops, which I hope will provide us with some data that will reveal the extent to which we are on track with these workshops. My Advising Appointments The most challenging aspect of my field experience was conducting my own academic advising appointments. This experience really brought me outside of my comfort zone because they challenged me to take a front row seat in the advising appointment as oppose to observing.

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Prior to my first set of appointments, I was extremely nervous because I doubted my abilities to know all the right information, and I was fearful of guiding a student down the wrong path. In observing other Deans and seeing just how much they know about course sequences and academic programs, I felt very much incapable of conducting these appointments. What I found most interesting was that I was more comfortable having a conversation with a student about his or her suicidal ideation than I was with having a conversation about academics. This just blows my mind. My first set of appointments was a little shaky. I very much depended on Dean Traxler, who sat in on all of my appointments, to jump in and save me when I didnt know the answer to a specific question. In my second set of appointments, I felt a bit more comfortable engaging in conversation with students, and I reverted to using some of my counseling skills such as active listening, asking probing questions, and clarifying the students thoughts. I learned how to read a students transcript and look at his or her degree navigator progress toward core requirements in order to try to determine where a student is developmentally in his or her college career. Asking a simple question about how a student likes a certain course can help guide the student toward discovering an interest in a particular subject as a potential major or minor. I found it so surprising that I could be so helpful to a student with regards to his or her academic schedule just by asking the right questions. From gaining feedback from Dean Traxler, I realized that I didnt have to know every answer to every question because that comes with experience and time. I learned that I must have confidence in my abilities to relate to students and communicate in such a way that can help them find answers to their own questions. Of course, there were lots of questions that made me feel like a deer in headlights, but there were also many parts of the conversation that allowed me to ask a student about his or her interests and helped him or her see things differently. In one of

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my conversations with a first year student who was extremely anxious about completing her core requirements as quickly as possible, I was able to see just how capable I was in terms of assuaging a students worry. I was able to have a very honest conversation with her about how important it is to not race toward completing the core requirements, but rather to complete them in a smart way that makes sense and fits within her other academic goals. I found this conversation very interesting because it showed me that students do not always see out advising to obtain finite answers, but they sometimes seek out advising in order to help them cope. While I am sure that she is still worried about completing her core requirements, I am confident that for at least that appointment, I was able to help her see the situation differently. As an advisor, I think that is often times the goal. Advising at Rutgers Since Rutgers does not require students to see an advisor, I found it very interested to analyze the various types of students that came in for advising appointments. While I was working in a first year advising office, each Dean still does do general advising for any student in the School of Arts and Sciences. In a given day, a Dean could see a proactive first year that just wants reassurance about his or her classes for the upcoming semester, a transfer student who feels incredibly behind because most of his or her credits did not transfer, a junior who wants to take extra winter term classes in order to graduate early and go to medical school, and a probationary student who is required to see the Dean because he or she has failed a course for the fifth time. With such a variety of cases, I learned that academic advisors must be extreme generalists. While there are transfer Deans, probation Deans, and first year Deans, all of the advisors must be able to adapt to various students with extremely different backgrounds and circumstances. Additionally, I learned that academic advisors must be able to transition quickly

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to different students when they have back-to-back appointments. During my appointments, I found it sometimes difficult to move so swiftly to a totally different student with a vastly different academic situation. Without a doubt, my advising appointments forced me outside of my comfort zone and challenged me to utilize an entirely different skill set. While I talk to students all the time, I rarely have an advising role. I found it so interesting that students respected my ability to advise because I feared that they would see me deferring to Dean Traxler for some answers as incompetence; however, I did not feel that way at all. Furthermore, during my final set of appointments, I felt much more comfortable in terms of taking the lead on questions that I could confidently answer. As I progressed in appointments, I found that I did not have to defer to Dean Traxler as much, which really made me realize that I can do this. Most importantly, I learned that I do not have to have all the answers. No one truly does. Academic Advising and My Career Goals As my field experience in academic advising comes to an end, I have been reflecting on my feelings toward a career in academic advising. While I do not think that I want to start off in academic advising, I do believe that the advising skills I have developed with help me further my career goals in orientation. Unlike Rutgers, many orientation programs are tightly linked with academic advising. Often times, undergraduate orientation leaders do some advising in their roles. Therefore, I think my advising experience will be extremely useful for me as I pursue a career in orientation and first year programs or student activities. As I compare my experience advising to my role supervising as a Hall Director, I see how extremely different the two are. Advising is very much a partnership that makes me think of Baxter Magoldas theory of selfauthorship and the tandem bicycle. As an advisor, you are not directly steering the bicycle, but

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merely helping to guide it from going too far off course. First year students are a population that interests me greatly. They require a great deal of guidance and help particularly in navigating their transition to college. As I move into my first professional role, ideally with orientation and first year programs, I plan to use my advising experience to make myself an even more effective guide for my students journey toward self-authorship.