Faculty Advisors Research Articles

Branching out as a mentor.

Two years ago, the vice president for student life at my university asked me to serve as a faculty adviser of a student group. I enjoy mentoring and have worked with a number of student groups over the years, but this offer was different. The group—called Brother 2 Brother (B2B)—is largely composed of African American and Latino students. It has a good reputation for fostering a supportive environment for male students who find themselves in the minority in virtually every other situation they encounter across campus. But I was reluctant to get involved because I didn't see myself as the right person for the job. What would a 52-year-old white male professor raised in largely white northern Appalachia have to offer? > “The students have taught me to see the world through a different lens.” It wasn't the first time the administrator, who founded B2B, asked me to get involved. Previously, I had always declined, thinking that the job would be better left to someone whose background was more similar to that of the group members. Plus, I wasn't sure I could fit it in my schedule. This time, though, with the administrator heading off to a different university and the current faculty adviser in poor health, I felt I couldn't say no. I knew from the beginning that I needed to earn the right to be listened to—that my age, rank, and background would discourage openness. I spent roughly 1 year paying dues—simply being present, listening, and trying to be helpful—before the students began to see me as worthy of trust. The first few meetings were especially awkward. I was clearly the outsider—that out-of-place white dude sitting in the corner. The students shot me looks indicating they were wondering why I was there. During the first year, I only managed to develop a few connections. It was a little disheartening, but I stuck with it because I had made a commitment and no one stepped up to take my place. I'm glad I continued to work with the group, because in year two the students started to open up to me with questions and problems. There was little overlap between my rural upbringing and my students' largely urban backgrounds, but we bonded by discussing shared elements of our college experience: crummy jobs, financial aid issues, classroom experiences, music, sports, and the horrors of cafeteria food. I did my best to help when they came to me with problems, even when I couldn't solve them myself. For example, one undergraduate student explained that he was having difficulty getting assistance from his academic adviser. I knew the faculty member, and I also knew he wasn't considered to be the best mentor. So I connected the student with another adviser, someone who always has time for students and is willing to problem-solve. I've also given group members tips about how to study and where to go on campus to troubleshoot administrative and academic issues. I didn't do anything most faculty couldn't do; the difference was that I was in the room to listen and provide advice. My interactions with the B2B students have, honestly, been a highlight of my career—not only because I feel like I'm doing something worthwhile, but also because of what I've learned. The students have taught me to see the world through a different lens. They have given me a better understanding of the experiences of people of color—which, I believe, has strengthened my cultural competence and my ability to interact with others on a more meaningful level. And in the process, I've made new friends. I encourage my fellow faculty members to get involved in programs such as B2B, even if you're not a member of an underrepresented group. It requires patience and time; it can be challenging, but it's also rewarding and fun. What's more, you'll help ease the service burden carried by our minority colleagues, work that is often invisible to white faculty and staff.

Managing the Critical Friendship: Using Self-Study in the Doctoral Supervision Process

ABSTRACT Self-study presents one approach to research that can be used to understand how current teacher educators and teacher education doctoral students (re)develop their practice and are socialized into academic norms. In some of these instances, faculty advisors may serve in a critical friendship capacity. This introduces an important power dynamic into the self-study process as advisors serve in a supervisory capacity over their students. The purpose of the current study was to understand the process through which a self-study-informed critical friendship influenced the development of our relationship as doctoral supervisor (Kevin) and doctoral student (Tori). Data came from each of our reflective journals as well as formal and informal critical friend discussions. Through qualitative data analysis, we sought to identify turning points through a collaborative process. Results indicated that engaging in a critical friendship through self-study provided us with the space and encouragement to critique traditional power structures and develop a more honest relationship. We specifically identified three turning points relative to the development of our mentoring relationship: (a) initial apprehensions and shared frustrations at the beginning of the process, (b) learning about and coming to trust one another through critical friendship, and (c) creating a more enjoyable and effective supervisory relationship. These results highlight both the benefits and challenges of faculty advisors serving as critical friends for their doctoral students and are discussed in relation to occupational socialization theory.

The Impact of Two-Minute Training Sessions on Confidence level for Providing Compression-Only Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation

Teresa Faykus, Faculty Advisor, Nursing, West Liberty University; Taylor Curry, Nursing Student and Austin Raines, Nursing Student, West Liberty University, West Liberty, WV.The Impact of Two-Minute Training Sessions on Confidence Level For Providing Compression- Only Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Studies have shown that bystander compression-only resuscitation for adult, out-of-hospital cardiac arrest victims improve overall survival rates. Unfortunately, 70% of Americans do not know how to administer resuscitation attempts or are afraid of hurting the victim. Therefore, only 27-41% of sudden cardiac arrest victims receive immediate resuscitation attempts. The research question is: Can simplified performance steps, simplified training, and elimination of mouth-to-mouth contact help bystanders feel more confident in taking the appropriate actions for saving a life? Objectives include training college students, staff, and faculty in chest-compression only resuscitation for an adult sudden cardiac arrest victim; measuring self-reported confidence levels before and after the training by using a Likert scale, and gathering self-reported confidence level factors. Nursing students included staff, faculty, and students to randomly participate. Data was gathered, a two-minute training and a return demonstration was completed, and post confidence levels were recorded. Of the total 134 participants, 85% reported a positive change in confidence levels. Of those, 55% had positive differences in their confidence of 2, 3, or 4 levels. When dissecting the confidence factors, three of the six options stood out as being the most chosen: “I feel that I may hurt someone if I don’t do it correctly”, “I don’t know the steps of CPR”, and “I’m afraid that I would get in trouble or get sued”. By understanding how confident the public is in initiating CPR and what influences these confidence levels, training can be better guided.

Advancing Health Policy and Advocacy Education in Medical School through a Student-run Elective

Introduction: Training medical students in the policy topics of healthcare economics, delivery systems, disparities, and reform helps to prepare them for the growing role of advocacy in medicine. We used a near-peer educational model to create an elective to advance learners’ policy knowledge and advocacy skills, while simultaneously offering student directors hands-on experience in educational program development. Methods: The 4-week elective for fourth year medical students included weekly readings, policy seminars, advocacy workshops, and journal clubs. Longitudinally, students prepared for a policy debate and prepared a research project or Op-Ed article on a healthcare disparity topic of their choice. The elective was designed, coordinated, and implemented by a team of first, second, third, and fourth-year medical students with faculty adviser oversight. Pre- and post-surveys were utilized to assess student learners’ knowledge of subject material and their perceptions of the effectiveness of the curriculum. Student directors self-assessed their confidence with the subject material and acquired skill in educational program development. Results: Student learners (n=6) noted significant improvement in their knowledge of health policy (P=0.0002) and advocacy (P=0.0064). They also reported improvement in several subtopics under policy and advocacy, with significant improvements seen in healthcare reform (P=0.0131) and writing skills (P=0.0099). Student directors (n=4) reported improved skills in curriculum development, educational evaluation, and leadership. Discussion: This novel student-run elective provided effective training in health policy and advocacy that extends beyond traditional curricula in medical school. Employing a near-peer model, the elective offers a sustainable system to educate interested students in these subjects and provide student directors unique experience in medical education. Further evaluation of future iterations will help determine the effectiveness of the curriculum in advancing individual policy and advocacy subtopics to guide future curricular modifications.

Strategies for progression in a PhD nursing program within a transitionmodel.

There is a need for interventions to improve the PhD pipeline for nursing program enrollment. PhD nursing students who have navigated the program successfully are in a strategic position to help by sharing their stories. Several strategies for successful completion of a PhD program and some common expected barriers have been documented in the literature. The authors used personal reflections from their first and second years of study in a PhD nursing program to identify strategies to progress through a program. The personal reflections were analyzed by their student cohort and a faculty advisor using the Bridges' Transition Model as a theoretical framework. The cohort members included five females and one male, ages 29-48, attending a PhD nursing program in the Southeastern, US. The following strategies were identified from the personal reflections: seeking and offering support within your cohort; establishing a relationship with mentors; identifying and using a reference manager; mastering time management; soaking up statistics; and focusing on your focus. The strategies listed above occurred within the ending and/or neutral zone phases of the Bridges' Transition Model. It is important to note the early phases of transition and need for success strategies in these specific phases of transition. PhD nursing students are in a strategic position to positively influence the PhD pipeline by providing personal reflections that inform future PhD nursing students as well as PhD nursing programs.

Advisor–advisee feminist relational mentoring: A heartfelt autoethnographic conversation

AbstractAcademia is frequently a hostile place where students, pre‐tenure scholars, women, people of color, disabled, queer, transgender, and nonbinary people face perpetual challenges. “You do not belong here” or “you are not good enough” can feel like a constant refrain. Yet some students find their path and pursue their graduate studies with determination, or even passion, joy, and a sense of satisfaction. A successful mentoring relationship with a faculty member can contribute to that success. This article tells the story of how two very differently positioned women in academia forged a unique mentoring relationship that produced unexpected and positive outcomes. One measure of this relationship's success is the student's transformation from hesitant master's student to confident doctoral student pursuing a self‐designed multidisciplinary doctoral degree. Less tangibly but no less important, the increasingly reciprocal and horizontal nature of this mentoring relationship allowed both parties to take risks in their academic lives and to step into more liberatory modes of knowing and being in the academy. In this article we, a white American tenured faculty advisor and a Saudi‐American Muslim woman PhD advisee, trace some of the key turning points in this advising story through a duo‐autoethnographic (duoethnography: a collaborative research methodology in which two or more researchers juxtapose their life histories in order to provide multiple understandings of a social phenomenon) dialogue. We relay how our mentoring relationship allowed each of us to transcend our scripted academic roles and fostered an enabling environment for doctoral study and risky scholarship. We acknowledge that mentoring is not a one‐size‐fits‐all approach, yet we hope that by highlighting some dimensions of our relationship we might inform others seeking a feminist, relational, horizontal, supportive model for academic mentoring.

Design of a Robot for the 2019 NASA Robotic Mining Competition

The viability of extracting water on both the Moon and Mars is a focus of NASA as they explore the idea of In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU). Marquette Aerospace and Robotic Systems (MARS) is participating in the 2019 NASA Robotic Mining Competition (RMC), a competition driven by using the systems engineering process to design, build, and test a robot capable of autonomously mining icy-regolith simulant in an off-world terrain to simulate an ISRU mining mission. The team used systems engineering to guide technical management, design, and operations of the robot. With feedback from the team’s faculty advisor and industry sponsors, the team utilized multiple systems engineering approaches. No single systems engineering process was selected, rather the team drew from multiple reference texts. The proposed design satisfies the requirements outlined in the 2019 NASA RMC Rules and Rubrics and placed 6th out of 50 in the competition.

Advising Experiences Among First-year International Doctoral Students

The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand how international graduate students in their first-year of doctoral study selected their faculty advisor and how this selection process influenced their advising relationship. Our results found that a majority of students in our sample were assigned to an interim advisor and most reported a positive advising experience. However, disquieting patterns emerged from the data: low frequency of advisor-advisee interaction, occurrences of mismatching between advisor-advisee, and an unknowingness of how to engage with one’s faculty advisor. Our study adds to the literature focusing on international students by shedding a light on nuanced advising experiences of first-year international doctoral students and by providing recommendations for faculty advisors and directors of graduate studies on ways to improve and systematize their advising practices so as to encourage retention and success among international doctoral students.

My wellness is

Purpose As online education proliferates, little attention has been given to understanding non-cognitive success factors, such as wellness, in online graduate student success. To begin to address this gap in understanding, this paper aims to explore the experiences of doctoral student wellness within the context of online distance education. Doctoral students, and their instructor, in an advanced qualitative research course sought to use collective autoethnography to address the following questions: How do the authors perceive the wellness as doctoral students engaged in distance education, and how do the authors understand the influence of the doctoral program cultures on the perceptions of the own wellness? Design/methodology/approach This paper emerged from a 12 week advanced qualitative research course where students opted to engage in a poetic arts-based collective autoethnography to reflect on and analyze their experience of wellness as doctoral students taking online courses. Data collection included the use of reflective journaling, creation of “My Wellness Is” poetry, and weekly group debriefing. Journals and poems were analyzed individually, then collectively. First and second cycle coding techniques were used, with the first cycle including process and descriptive coding and second round coding involving pattern coding. Findings Through first and second round coding, three primary themes emerged: positionality as an element of wellness, the role of community in maintaining wellness and awareness and action regarding wellness. Research limitations/implications Due to the inherent nature of qualitative research, and specifically autoethnographic methods, the findings of this study may be difficult to generalize to the broader online graduate student population. Future research on this topic may use the experiences explored in this study as a basis for the development of future quantitative studies to measure the extent of these findings in the broader population. Practical implications This paper includes implications for the development of interventions that may support wellness in graduate students in online environments including support interventions from faculty advisors, leveraging academic curriculum to promote wellness, and suggestions for building community among online graduate students. Social implications As technology advances, online education is quickly becoming a leading mechanism for obtaining a graduate education. Scholarship in this discipline has primarily focused on academic outcomes of online students and has largely focused on undergraduate populations. This paper broadens the conversation about online education by illustrating a non-cognitive dimension of the student experience, i.e. wellness, through the perspective of graduate students. Originality/value This paper addresses a gap in the current understanding of online graduate student experiences and outcomes using methods that provide vivid illustrations of the nuanced experience of online doctoral students.

Seeing the Greenland Ice Sheet Through Students' Eyes

A team of students and faculty advisers revisited the site of pioneering geosciences expeditions from the 1920s, looking to introduce young researchers to polar science.

STEM Curriculum Implementation and Academic Performance of Senior High School Students

The study primarily focused on determining the extent of implementation of the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) curriculum in the University of Northern Philippines. The research looked into the profile of 12th Grade STEM students including their academic performance. It also determined the extent of implementation of STEM curriculum. This study employed the descriptive-correlational research design in determining students’ profile and extent of the STEM curriculum implementation as it correlates to academic performance. It involved 189 student-respondents and five faculty advisers to answer the questionnaires. This study passed through the ethics review committee of the university. Data gathered were analyzed using frequency and percentage, weighted mean and simple correlational analysis. Results showed that majority of the students are female who attended public high school and obtained 85-89 general weighted average rating. The extent of STEM curriculum implementation is very great. There is a significant relationship of students’ sex and GWA to their academic performance. However, it showed that the type of Junior high school they graduated from and their academic performance have no significant relationship. Moreover, the extent of STEM curriculum implementation has no significant relationship with students’ academic performance. It is recommended that science and mathematics grades could be the basis for academic performance. It is also encouraged that science and mathematics teachers undergo training in curriculum planning and implementation.

EXPLORING THE SOCIALIZATION EXPERIENCES OF UNDERREPRESENTED ENGINEERING GRADUATE STUDENTS

Diversity in the American population is not reflected in engineering graduate programs and engineering faculty. Research has primarily focused on experiences at the doctoral level to understand faculty advisor and student relationships that impact degree attainment by students from underrepresented groups. Fewer studies have explored the spectrum of factors, from anticipatory experiences to actualized experiences, that shape the graduate student socialization experience of underrepresented students inclusive of both master's and doctoral students and the impact the socialization experience has on their career trajectories. This study explores factors that shape how domestic graduate engineering students who identify as Black, African American, or Hispanic are being socialized to think about graduate school, how these groups experience the socialization process once enrolled in graduate school, and how those experiences during enrollment shape career trajectories. Findings indicate that the socialization process for this group of students during graduate enrollment is misaligned with what they anticipated the experience would be. In particular, a perceived lack of faculty advisor interest in their personal development during graduate enrollment challenged the views students held about the graduate school experience. The socialization experience of Black, African American, or Hispanic engineering graduate students was influenced by tokenism and a lack of connection to long-term career goals. Findings indicate that given these experiences, these students were unlikely to pursue a career in academia.

In Pursuit of Careers in the Professoriate or Beyond the Professoriate: What Matters to Doctoral Students When Making a Career Choice?

Aim/Purpose: This qualitative study was conducted to illuminate the under-researched aspect of doctoral students’ career decision-making by examining their internal cognitive processes based on the Cognitive Information Processing (CIP) theory. Specifically, this study compared doctoral students’ career decision-making from two career groups, those pursuing the professoriate versus those pursuing careers beyond the professoriate. Background: Due to PhD workforce supply-demand imbalances in academic job markets and to a growing interest in careers outside academia around the world, an increasing number of doctoral recipients have pursued careers beyond the professoriate, which are considered non-traditional career paths in doctoral education. While a growing number of studies have investigated these changing trends, it remains limited to fully capture more introspective domains of the career choice processes. Given that the career decision-making experience is highly individualized, it is critical to explore doctorate students’ own narratives about career decision-making. Methodology: Individual structured interviews were conducted with 30 doctoral students from a public research-oriented university in the United States. Employing Directed Content Analysis, two researchers developed the initial coding categories based on the guiding theory, CIP theory, and deductively analyzed the data to identify emerging major themes. Contribution: Findings from the study highlight the core factors that influence doctoral students’ career choices across fields, which allows developing centralized career resources and support systems at the institutional level. Specifically, findings pointed to different approaches for doctoral students to (re-)assess their career choice while providing implications for institutions, academic departments, and individual stakeholders such as faculty advisor and doctoral students, to develop systematic career support in this changing academic job market. Findings: Data analysis uncovered three core factors impacting doctoral students’ career decision making, which are (1) roles of the first-hand experience in career confirmation/shift; (2) dissimilar career readiness status by group; and (3) impact of personal career values. Recommendations for Practitioners: Both institutions and academic departments could reassess the culture and value of career development and refine co-curricular activities to offer adequate professional development opportunities in doctoral training to develop career support systems aligned with students’ diversified career needs and interests. As time and first-hand experiences are identified as critical factors facilitating their career progress, doctoral students may want to proactively seek diverse opportunities to gain first-hand experience in and outside campus. Recommendation for Researchers: Researchers could continue similar research in other universities and countries where similar concerns exist. These studies would help fully clarify common influential factors on career choices of doctoral students across fields. Impact on Society: Considering the realities of doctoral students’ diversified career interests and career outcomes, institutes of higher education should make intentional efforts to broaden the definition of “successful” PhD career outcomes, which ultimately helps break the prevailing myth that doctoral students or recipients who pursue careers beyond the professoriate, called nontraditional or alternative career paths, are considered as failures or incompetent. Future Research: Future research should consider examining diverse doctoral student populations such as early-stage doctoral students to discover additional factors influencing their career decision-making. The authors also recommend cross-cultural studies in other countries where similar career concerns exist, such as the U.K. and the Netherlands, to develop a more comprehensive understanding of how doctoral students’ career decisions are made.

Lower-Third SLOE Rankings Impede, But Do Not Prevent, A Match in Emergency Medicine Residency Training.

Objective:Emergency medicine program directors (PD) value the standardized letter of evaluation (SLOE) as the most important aspect of a residency application when making both invitation and ranking decisions. This study aims to determine whether the presence of any lower-third in either SLOE global assessment (GA) question impacted the ability of an applicant to match into EM. We hypothesized that any lower-third ranking would be associated with increased odds of not matching into EM.Methods:We conducted a retrospective cohort study evaluating allopathic applicants from medical schools in the United States (US allopathic applicants) to a single EM residency program during the 2018/2019 match cycles. GA SLOE rankings from all applications were tabulated and compared to the applicant’s National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) match outcome. Comparative analyses were conducted between SLOE groupings and odds ratios (OR) were calculated.Results:A total of 2,017 SLOEs from 781 US allopathic applicants were analyzed during the study period. Of the total, 277 (35%) applicants in our sample had any lower-third GA ranking, which significantly decreased an applicant’s odds of matching in EM by 79% (OR 0.21, 95% CI, 0.12-0.34). Having more than one lower-third GA ranking did not further statistically decrease the odds of a successful EM match (OR 0.60, 95% CI 0.31-1.17). As a secondary finding of the study, results demonstrate that those applicants having no lower-third GA rankings had a nearly 5 times increased odds of an EM match (OR 4.84, 95% CI, 2.91-8.03).Conclusion:Having any lower-third GA ranking significantly reduced an applicant’s chances of matching into an EM program. Faculty advisors should be aware of the increased risk of not matching for any applicant with any lower-third GA ranking and advise students appropriately, while maintaining the integrity of the SLOE and not divulging the confidential information contained within.

Emailing a Prospective Graduate Faculty Advisor? Things to Think About Before Hitting Send

Emailing a Prospective Graduate Faculty Advisor? Things to Think About Before Hitting Send

Rising expectations: Natural resources graduate student authorship of publications

AbstractPublication patterns of natural resources graduate students from nine U.S. universities were compared across seven decades in an effort to assist graduate students and faculty members in setting realistic expectations for publication. Graduate students steadily increased their level of publication in peer‐reviewed journals across the study period. In the 1950s, 0% of doctoral students published their research and by the 2000s, 73% of doctoral students published their research. There was also an increasing temporal trend in the number of co‐authors on graduate student publications. In the 1960s, 50% of graduate student publications had two co‐authors and in the 2000s, 28% of graduate‐student publications had two authors; 29% had three authors; 21% had four authors; 13% had five authors; and 10% had six or more authors. Publications authored by doctoral students received significantly more citations (average of 23.2 citations per publication) than those publications authored by master's students (average of 17.1 citations per publication). As expectations for graduate student publication and ability to work on larger research teams rise, it is important that universities and faculty advisors provide resources and training to allow graduate students to successfully reach these new expectations.

Pressed, and: Objection

Pressed, and: Objection Simone Muench (bio) and Jackie K. White (bio) Pressed On a sheetless mattress, immobile andundone, I was marked for ruin. I drownedin dread, became a stain, a containerof shatter, of "I don't matter." I'm told to muzzle that memory with pillow plush,and smother all the old mouths' carpingas I'm pressed into performance, pushed to playthat old game perfectly. Now, I turn the mouth into spewing glass. The anatomy of a rupture.I burn. I bellow. I say no I say no I say no.This is the season of the scalpel, not nostalgia.This is the year of scraping out hauntings. I said no. Now I shove that ghost into the fold,press back, iron the sheets of my choosing. [End Page 57] Objection Some wept watching Love Connection. Some weptin search of goddesses. Some wept earlyin the year. Some wept later in a novelwith faces reflected in a pool of vodka. Some were warned by lipstick on the glass.Some did the warning by earmarking oddpages. Some whispered the ancient spells,some wrote coded scripts. All were rejected. But some rose saying no longer betweenlightning's flash & clap. Some rose to mistrial.Some rose to file a missing person's report.Some rose & cast curses, mouths licked in spit, fingers unpricked, pointing, eyes untissued,dry and daring, arms tort-wielding: watch this. [End Page 58] Simone Muench Simone Muench is the author of six books, including Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014). Her recent, Suture, includes sonnets written with Dean Rader (BLP, 2017). She is an editor of They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (BLP, 2018) and curator, with Kenyatta Rogers, of the HB Sunday Reading Series in Chicago. She serves as faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review and as a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Jackie K. White Sam Taylor is the author of three books of poems, including Body of the World (Ausable/Copper Canyon) Nude Descending an Empire (Pitt Poetry), and The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse (forthcoming, Negative Capability). "White Trash" is an excerpt from The Book of Fools, a book-length experimental elegy for our earth and oceans that marries global, ecological themes of loss to personal, confessional ones. He is an Associate Professor and the Director of the MFA Program at Wichita State. He received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and his poems have appeared in such journals as The Kenyon Review, AGNI, and The New Republic. <www.samtaylor.us> Copyright © 2020 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Implementation and evaluation of an advisement program focused on academic and career development

IntroductionThis research evaluated a formal academic and career advisement program implemented in a doctor of pharmacy program, which included a “Meet Your Advisor” luncheon and required faculty advisement sessions with an assigned faculty member. MethodsThe advising experience of students from two cohorts of first-year pharmacy students who received the formal advisement program (referred to as advisement cohort 1 and advisement cohort 2) were compared to the experience of a cohort of second-year students who entered prior to the formal advisement program (referred to as the pre-advisement cohort). All students completed a survey with both quantitative and qualitative questions regarding the advisement program. ResultsOur research demonstrates that the formal advisement program was successful at ensuring that nearly all students receive personalized advisement. In the pre-advisement cohort 65% of students reported receiving individual advisement, while 94% of students in advisement cohort 1 reported individual advisement and 95% in advisement cohort 2. Advisement cohort 2 responded similarly to the pre-advisement cohort on many of the advisement scales, especially the developing understanding scales, which provided evidence that two years after making the advisement program mandatory, students were having similar experiences to the smaller group of students who self-selected to receive advisement. ConclusionsA formal advisement program can be developed to include all students. Our research provides evidence that it may take time for the changes to be impactful and suggests the importance of faculty development.

Strengthening a Tobacco-Free College Campus Policy Through Signage: GIS Mapping for Advocacy to Improve Implementation.

Implementing tobacco-free policies on university campuses has become increasingly common. However, promoting policy compliance remains a challenge. It is important to develop strategies that can overcome barriers to successful policy implementation and promote compliance. This Practice Note presents a case study of a practical strategy for addressing poor implementation of a newly adopted tobacco-free policy. Following principles of advocacy research, a team of student researchers and a faculty advisor developed a protocol to identify tobacco-related signage and environmental cues for tobacco use (e.g., cigarette-butt receptacles, designated smoking areas) on campus. Ten months after a tobacco-free campus policy went into effect, we identified 153 signs and 65 environmental cues. Of these, only two signs accurately described the current policy. Mapping signage and cues to use tobacco on campus can be an important advocacy tool to improve the implementation of tobacco-free campus policies. Increased adherence to new policies can be achieved through advocacy and outreach to university administrators.

A Case Study on Faculty and Professional Advisor Perceptions on Academic Advising

This case study addressed the attitudes and perceptions of faculty and professional advisors at a public comprehensive liberal arts institution. Based on a survey administered to full-time faculty and professional advisors in Fall 2009, the results showed a quantitative difference in levels of satisfaction with advising between the groups. Faculty resported a desire to function more in a mentoring capacity as well as increased recognition for advising during the promotion and tenure process, and identified a systemic need for better communication of policies and procedures. Professional advisors also raised these concerns but reported a higher level of overall satisfaction with advising. Concrete strategies to improve advising delivery were identified. Some preliminary best practices were addressed.