Last week, at the final College of Arts & Sciences faculty meeting of 2016-17, I had the pleasure of honoring eight faculty members with awards for excellence in teaching or advising. At the end of the previous academic year I focused my dean’s note on the teaching awards; today I want to focus on academic advising. (I encourage you to read the full teaching award citations here.)
The Templeton Awards for Excellence in Student Advising showcase CAS advising at its best. Each year, Associate Dean for Student Academic Life Steve Jarvi calls for nominations from graduating seniors. This year the award recipients were William Carroll, professor of English; Shoai Hattori, lecturer in Neuroscience; and Sam Ling, assistant professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences. I am inspired by the care with which these three faculty members approach the important, but sometimes underappreciated, work of advising.
As I read out selections from student nominations, I got some insight into the qualities our students value in an advisor. They look for patience, understanding, and thoughtfulness. They like it when their advisors care about their lives outside the classroom. Our students value being mentored in scholarship, included in research, and informed of professional opportunities. They understand that faculty members are busy people, and they appreciate the time you take with them.
A range of important activities falls under the umbrella of advising, from assisting freshmen in selecting a class schedule to mentoring graduate students through completing a dissertation. Good advising practices help our students make informed decisions about their course and major options; select fields of study, co-curricular opportunities, and post-graduate pathways; and stay on track for graduation. Advisors help guide students who are dealing with obstacles, academic and (sometimes) personal.
In CAS, our advising system employs a variety of models. The CAS Academic Advising Office advises undergraduates who have not yet declared a major, while our pre-professional advisors assist pre-law and pre-med students enrolled in any of BU’s colleges or schools. Once they have declared a major, CAS students are assigned departmental advisors, either a faculty member or, in some departments, a professional advisor. Advising in CAS fits into a bigger university-wide undergraduate advising system, connected by a network of advisors and united by a shared mission statement for undergraduate advising at BU: “Academic Advising is integral to the teaching mission of the University and engages students in a collaborative process to explore academic and co-curricular opportunities as part of a plan to realize academic, career and life goals.”
Advising offices throughout BU have recently embarked on an impressive effort to improve undergraduate advising, beginning with compiling inventories of advising practices. In CAS, Dean Jarvi and Courtney Martin, director of Academic Advising, are leading this project; the result will be the development of a plan to make sure our advising in CAS furthers the mission articulated above and realizes the learning outcomes associated with that mission. They hope that through this process we will learn what is working best in CAS, that departments will learn from each other, and that students in CAS will receive consistent, high-quality advising regardless of their major.
I join in these aspirations. We start this process from a strong foundation: the Templeton Awards highlight the value CAS places on advising. Building on our strengths to ensure the quality of our advising throughout CAS will be even more important as we make the transition to a university-wide general education system, the BU Hub.
As the academic year draws to a close, I want to thank all of you in CAS for your hard work in advising and teaching our students.