GRANTS |
Innovation and Incubator Grants from the University System of Georgia |
Karen Higgs
Academic Advisor III
karen.higgs@gcsu.edu
478-445-2761
Wanda Johnson
Academic Advisor III
wanda.johnson@gcsu.edu
478-445-4826
Debi Lastinger
Academic Advisor III
debi.lastinger@gcsu.edu
478-445-6294
Nadirah Mayweather
Academic Advisor III
nadirah.mayweather@gcsu.edu
478-445-6298
Dwayne Peterson
Associate Director, Career Development
dwayne.peterson@gcsu.edu
478-445-5389
Nikki Simpson
Academic Advisor III
nikki.simpson@gcsu.edu
478-445-1635
Our Current Situation
Georgia College has a fully centralized professional advising model with 19 professional academic advisors. Our professional advisors are organized in clusters - reflecting the idea of Focus Areas - Business, Health Sciences, Humanities and Education, Social Science, and Math and Science. Our academic advisors serve all of our undergrads for all four years. Our advisors also teach first-year seminar and pre-register all entering freshmen for their fall semester classes beginning each February.
We are also fortunate to have a strong relationship with our Career Center. Their office currently has a greatly expanded team of 12 career advisors in order to provide a career advisor to each undergraduate, and has established a milestone program with career activities that students complete each year to better prepare for the world of work, internships, or graduate school.
With advising duties off their plates, our faculty currently have the luxury of truly serving as mentors to their students – shepherding them through upper level courses, presenting opportunities for undergraduate research, and assisting with networking and other preparations for graduate/professional school or career.
Georgia College currently meets several criteria of the momentum year, but to increase our momentum further, we want to bring these three populations together in teams to monitor and support our undergraduate students during their first year and beyond.
Our Proposal
Our idea is to create a Team Advising model composed of an academic advisor, career advisor and faculty mentor (with plans to work with faculty to identify highly qualified student peer advisors to be added soon thereafter). These advising teams will specifically work to help our students explore career pathways (reducing choice paralysis) and make purposeful program choices, develop a productive academic mindset, and complete nine (9) credit hours in an academic focus area during the first year. These teams will also monitor students beyond their momentum year to help them maximize their academic options and progress in a timely manner.
These teams would hold regular meetings within their clusters to review their students’ progress toward certain momentum year milestones and address trends/issues related to their progression. Proposed areas to monitor include:
Based on the needs and trends observed from this monitoring and review, the team would propose outreach and programming to address specific needs.
Quick examples of outreach following team review:
Our Needs
To accomplish this goal, we need to:
Our Expectations
Through a team advising model, we hope to see:
We expect that the majority of costs involved would primarily be planning and set-up. So, a Momentum Grant would allow us to produce concrete, actionable steps to implement this new team advising model.
We expect this proposed program to be SUSTAINABLE … Once the teams are up and running, operational costs should then be minimal and expenses could be shared by the Advising Center, the Career Center, and individual academic departments involved.
We expect this proposed program to be TRANSFORMATIVE … Team Advising at GC would involve all of our undergraduate students.
We expect this proposed program is SCALABLE … Other institutions can certainly implement Team Advising as well, depending on the size and composition of their advising center and career center staffs; or the teams can be comprised of other faculty, staff, or student members.