Academic Advisers for New Students

One quick note before we get to the main feature. Incoming students got a message today from the Office of Residence Life and Housing about suggested move-in times for Move-In Day, August 17. (For any of our families whose students are doing Pre-Orientation or other early arrivals, they should have already received instructions on when and where to check-in. If not, your student should contact housing@wfu.edu.)

Sometime soon (likely in early August is my guess), we will assign Academic Advisers for New Students. Sometimes we refer to them as LDAs (Lower Division Advisers), because they advise your students during their Divisional requirements, before they declare their majors. Today I want to share some insight on the adviser assignment process.

Students will have a lower division academic adviser (usually a faculty member, but sometimes a staff member) and a student adviser (sophomore, junior, or senior). Those academic adviser assignments for new students are made randomly. My own academic adviser was a science professor and I knew I wanted to be an English major. I remember thinking [read: worrying] that my adviser and I would have little in common and why the heck couldn’t I have been given an English professor as an adviser?

There is, of course, a method to the madness. A lot of times, students come in thinking they will major in X but turn out to major in Y. By having an adviser randomly assigned, it can help students keep an open mind to the MANY major options. It also avoids putting students in an awkward situation of having to tell their adviser they do not wish to major in that person’s department after all. No matter who their lower division adviser is, all academic advisers have been trained in our curriculum requirements and are well poised to help first-year students navigate the course selection process.

Having an adviser in a different department also stretches our students interpersonally. I had to figure out how to talk to my adviser and form a positive, constructive relationship even though our interests were vastly different. I would not have learned nearly as much if my adviser had been an English professor with whom it was easy to form a rapport. As your students progress through college and move toward their future careers, it will be vital for them to know how to form productive working relationships with people, especially ones where they don’t see a ton of commonality.

That said, many students wish to connect early on with representatives from potential majors or minors, and we absolutely encourage this. It takes a village, so your students can and should seek out other voices and mentors as thinking partners.

A student’s assigned academic adviser is the starting point – and they will retain that adviser until declaring a major in spring of their sophomore year. But students can reach out to other advisers as needed: that might be faculty in a potential major area, or the full-time professional academic counselors in the Office of Academic Advising, who will always be ready to provide good counsel and recommendations.

Finally, the advising relationship depends a lot on what the student puts into it. I always tell my advisees that I will be as present – or absent – in their Wake Forest experience as they wish for me to be. We treat students as young adults and expect them to communicate with us when they need something, and most of the time ‘no news is good news.’ In my experience, when I have reached out to my new student advisees en masse to ask how they are doing, very few of them respond – and that’s OK! That typically means that everything is going fine and they aren’t in need of help.

Be assured that students have to have a face-to-face meeting with their adviser at Orientation, and then again mid- to late-fall before registering for spring semester classes, so there is always a personal check-in required. That might be all the interaction a given student has with their adviser, or they are free to ask for more mentoring, more time, etc. if they want/need it.

Like most relationships, the more you put into it, the better results you will have. Your students will find the balance that works best for them.

— by Betsy Chapman, Ph.D. (’92, MA ’94)

July 27, 2022