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5 Productive Paths For Professors When Advising Students

24th March, 2010 - Posted by Meggin - No Comments

Depending on your particular institution, advising of students may be a small portion or a significant part of your responsibilities. Adapt the following five tips to fit your situation so that advising is a productive experience for you and your students.

Request that students come to their appointments with a list of questions to which they would like answers. Coming and just plopping down in your office is not helpful.

Create an advisee email list so that you can bcc all of your advisees to send out reminders about particular deadlines that they should be aware of. It is worth taking the time to do that rather than having 20% of them “forget” a deadline, which you then have to help them move past, get extensions for, etc. Invest a few minutes; save hours.

Expect timeliness. If a student’s appointment is at 3:00, expect him/her to be there by 3:00 – and preferably earlier. Make it clear to students that you will do everything you can to be respectful of their time and you need them to help you with that. Keeping to a schedule is one of the ways.

Keep notes about your advisees. You may keep them in a file on your computer or handwritten in special folders you have for them. It is the only way to remember what you discussed, decisions that were made, and or personal information about them (special upcoming events, awards, etc.). Students need faculty who CARE about them and this is one of the ways you can indicate that you do – without driving yourself nuts.

Schedule advising appointments within close proximity of each other. Once you put on your “advisor” hat, you want to keep it on. Especially during heavy advising times, keep like with like when possible, For example, if you advise both graduate and undergraduate students, then keep undergrads on one day and grads on a different day. It is far more efficient to be thinking about one group and having all the materials and information at hand – and top of mind. Even during the regular semester advising, if you have scheduled one advising appointment on a day and another student wants to be seen that same week, see if you can encourage that appointment time to be just before or just after it.

Regardless of whether you are “tasked” (ugh, I hate that word as a verb, but I used it anyway) with formal advising of students or you do so on a less formal basis, these ideas will help you be more productive while also being more helpful to students.

And for many more tips to help you be peacefully and predictably productive, you’re invited to join other faculty around the globe who subscribe (free) to Top Ten Productivity Tips for Professors series (info to be found at):

** http://TopTenProductivityTipsforProfessors.com

(c) 2010 Meggin McIntosh, Ph.D. | The Ph.D. of Productivity(tm)