We share articles, op-eds, ideas, and inspirations that are circulating in our advising community.
Pre-Major Advising Handbook
The Pre-Major Advising Handbook (PDF) is an annually updated guide to our shared advising practice. It includes directories, resources, curricular advising considerations, advising insights and best practices, notes on academic policies and practices, an overview of options and opportunities available to our students, and more.
Advising Sophomores
From the American Association of Colleges & Universities, here is a great piece about advising initiatives at Wofford College. It looks like they are implementing something that looks a lot like our Pre-Major Advising program, and developing resources so that faculty and staff advisors (with small cohorts) can help students avoid the Sophomore Slump.
Here is another one, from Belmont College on their coordinated efforts to thwart the Slump.
HERE is a great piece from the NYT that you might want to share with your students who are strugglng with how to choose a major.
The Great Jobs, Great Lives 2014 Gallup-Purdue Index Report
For your reference, you can read about the Gallup-Purdue Index Report here and here
Reflections Seminars
Pre-Major Advisor Tom Ehrlich discusses his experiences leading a Reflections Seminar.
Entrepreneurial Students
Recent piece in Business Insider, entitled Stanford Students are Dropping Out to Start their Own Companies
Engineering: Essential to the Liberal Arts
Pre-Major Advisor Stewart Levin shares this offering from the President of Princeton University's alumni magazine page positing that the flow between Arts and Engineering goes both ways.
...and continuing the conversation is this Op-Ed piece from the Washington Post, by Dr. Loretta Jackson Hayes.
The Opening Page
Thanks toPre-Major Advisors Greg Walton and Geoff Cohen, Pre-Major Advisors who participated in The Opening Page during the 2013-2014 school year may be interested to read this summary report, which explains the initiative itself, and what we learned from it.
Humor and Inspriration
Pre-Major Advisor JD Schramm forwarded this list of 15 Inspiring TED Talks for Freshmen Year. Anyone who works with frosh can appreciate these gems. If you see something that you think might resonate with one of your students, these make great shares.
Issues and Insights
"First Generation Students Unite" is a great piece by Laura Pappano, from The New York Times April 12, 2015.
"Why Poor Students Struggle" by Vicki Madden, The New York Times September 21 2014 is a compelling conversation starter, featuring this quote, "...once those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds arrive on campus, it’s often the subtler things, the signifiers of who they are and where they come from, that cause the most trouble, challenging their very identity, comfort and right to be on that campus. The more elite the school, the wider that gap."
