The Communication Department at OIT, where I currently teach, takes a developmental approach to academic advising: our program is small enough that each faculty member is able to advise half a dozen students. Advising covers the normal range of academic concerns (scheduling, ensuring progress towards graduation, checking in on struggling students), but it also deals with professional planning.
The degrees offered by our department, BS in Communication Studies and BS in Professional Writing, are idiosyncratic for a polytechnic like OIT. Programs like Mechanical Engineering, Geomatics, Dental Hygiene and Medical Imaging Technology are largely built for particular career paths (it’s right in the name!), but Communication and Writing are a little less concrete.
Our graduates go on to a huge array of different professions: mediators, social media managers, customer relations managers, teachers, police detectives, information technology specialists, counselors and more. Both programs use a “build your own degree” structure, with a set of core, required courses for every major and a large bucket of undefined credits for students to build their own focused sequence or specialization track. Students might select more communication and writing classes, becoming experts in getting information from one place to another. Students might also select courses from other programs, becoming expert liaisons between professionals and clients. Still other students might accumulate credits from other universities (or use a prior degree) as a means to starting a non-profit organization designed to help some segment of society.
As an advisor, this means working with students to determine their professional goals and what those goals will require. This means understanding the options available at OIT and elsewhere to achieve those goals. And, this means helping students close the articulation gap when they put together resumes and portfolios, since “BS in Professional Writing” doesn’t convey a specific skillset in the way “BS in Civil Engineering” does.
Broader Applicability
More broadly, my advising philosophy follows this form. When I am able to work with students individually to talk about their professional plans, I actively attempt to help them articulate the strengths they would bring to any organization and the knowledge they’ve accumulated in life, whether within their major or not. Because I teach so many general education courses close to students’ graduation, I frequently get the opportunity to talk to students about their broader career plans in many fields: healthcare, engineering, education, software design and more. I have learned enough of these career paths to help students articulate the connection between their backgrounds and their goals.
In these formal and informal advising situations, my role is support: as a teacher, I have accumulated knowledge of many fields by talking to students, faculty and professionals. I can’t always tell someone what to do to achieve their goals, but I can point them to resources to help in those decisions and work with them to construct a path to those goals.
