Interview with Joyce Wolburg, PhD.
Associate Dean, Diederich College of Communication
So why was this survey created is my first question.
Well, we had a survey years ago and I don’t really know why we discontinued using it, but we thought it might be a good idea to try that again. We looked at our old survey and then modified it and asked additional questions. Because we didn’t think it was going to answer everything that we needed to know. We really just wanted a sense of what we’re doing, what we’re doing well, what we could be doing better, are we really meeting students needs in the kind of information we provide. For example, some colleges like Arts & Sciences have professional advisors. We don’t. We rely on a combination of advising from our assistant dean who now advises the freshmen class and faculty members who advise students sophomores through seniors along with advising Sue Clinton provides from the records office and Steve Repati. We wanted to see how well that whole system is working to make sure that we are doing a good job with students because we want students to feel satisfied but also to be assured that they’re taking the right courses. There are many moments, I think, where it’s a bit nerve-wrecking to register for classes. It’s complicated. The university requires competencies in all those knowledge areas, but according to the university they will take any number of courses might fulfill a course,like diverse courses you know here’s a list of about 20 courses. But given which college you’re in, it might make more sense to take one of these than another, and for example in our college, we have a requirement that a student does either a foreign language or two additional diverse cultures classes. So, our students could potentially be taking 3 classes in diverse cultures where somebody else might be taking one. And so you know there’s just enough differences. Any one of a number of math courses could satisfy the mathematical reasoning requirement, but at least two of the majors in our college specifically require stats. And so if you take statistics, you have not only satisfied a requirement for the major and the university, whereas if you just took any math course you may find yourself in a situation where you’re taking one to satisfy the university and one to satisfy the major. So a student has to take two classes. We want to look for those kinds of efficiencies so that students can get by as efficiently as possible. And that’s really important when somebody transfers in and doesn’t start out in our college. After they’ve got 60 credit hours behind them, now they’re declaring a major in our college. We want to make sure that they can get their degree in 128 hours without having to stay longer, take more courses and so forth. There’s just enough complexity about advising that it’s not an easy thing, it’s not easy for students to necessarily wade through all of those requirements and understand the complexities. And so we just wanted to know how we’re doing, if we’ve got certain weaknesses where they might be so we can do the best job possible.
Ok. So what does the college hope that students get out of advising, ideally, after their four years, like what they’re experience was like?
Well, the ideal to me would be that students are getting really good information so that they are taking the right courses so that as they come close to graduation they’ve gotten all the requirements that they need in a comfortable manner. So that they don’t suddenly find out they have more requirements then they thought they had going into their senior year. It’s a lot about knowing the requirements, but it’s also, an advisor can help with career decisions. They may be able to give advice on what would be a better internship opportunity than another. Or should I do an internship, should I not? What do you think about this internship versus that? What area within my major am I likely to find jobs? Things like that, or even sometimes students come in with personal problems or they want advice on should I stay in this class, should I drop it, I don’t know what to do. Will I lose my scholarship if I go below a certain number of hours? There’s just a lot of questions that advisors can answer or at least they can send you to the right person to get the right answer. I would hope that at the end of four years a student would feel that they had a helping hand all the way through that they could go to not only to find out what courses they needed to take, but somebody who could answer all the questions that come up. Should I study abroad or not? Should I do an internship or not? Somebody that they could consult off and on to answer those kinds of questions.
Ok. So, do you know how the university will use those survey results?
We’re doing it for ourself rather than the university. We will probably share that information, we’ll summarize that information and share it with the university, but we’re doing it really for ourself. I don’t know if other colleges that are doing a similar kind of survey. It was just something that we wanted to do for our own benefit. But the way we would look at it is we want to know how we’re doing and particularly any areas where we feel that we are weak, we want to address those the best we can.
So how are you involved in advising? Do you advise any students?
Yes. I’m the associate dean, but I am also one of the advertising faculty members and we have a large number of advertising and PR students. I also advise some public relations students. Those are two majors that have a large number of students and we don’t have enough faculty members. If I were to say, “I’m not doing any advising,” that would put a strain on that department to find enough faculty members to advise advertising and PR students in particular, and also corporate comm students. So I haven’t wanted to put that burden on the faculty members, and so I’ll continue to see advertising students. Usually what we do in our college is a faculty member has all of the say sophomores or juniors or seniors in a particular major. Some faculty members see students in more than one major if there is enough overlap ... But we try to make it fairly narrow because there’s a lot of different requirements that change over the years ... The requirements may be different for all three students, and it’s hard to keep those in mind. So, we try to give each faculty member one discreet cohort of students. I have right now the juniors in advertising, so I will always have a cohort of students that I advise because I’m needed.
Do advisors typically work with career services to tell their students about the opportunities there?
To tell you the truth, I think we rely more on career services to send out announcements to students independently. I’m not sure that all the advisors know everything that career services is doing. They tend to send out, I think they send out email messages, or announcements ... They communicate directly with students. Now, that may be something that should be ... Maybe there’s some opportunities there to work better, hand in hand with career services. So that may be an area for improvement, but I would say that currently we rely on career services to communicate directly with students.
Are students encouraged to explore their options when it comes to majors, minors or different career paths in advising? Can they talk to their advisor?
Oh, certainly they cam talk to their advisor. I’ve had students come to me who were undecided. I’ve had students who were majoring in communications who suddenly think maybe they’re maybe in the wrong major, or want to transfer out of the college. I also see a lot of students who are thinking about transferring into the college and don’t know what major to choose in communications. I tend to see a lot of potential transfer students, but certainly any advisor in the college should be able to help a student if they are thinking of making a change to a major or adding a second major or whatever that is. Now in our college we require a minor and not all colleges do that. So, our faculty members, our advisors, probably know more about minors than a lot of faculty members in other colleges because not all of their students are doing a minor. So a very common question to me is what should I minor in if I’m an ad major, and so, I know the ones that are more typical. Not that a student necessarily have to stay with those. They may have a particular reason for doing something else. Yeah, we have to be fairly knowledgable about the different minors or know where to look it up. ... (talks to student)
Do advisors receive any training before they’re advisors or do they have to work in the college a certain number of years before they advise students?
We usually try to let a new faculty member, we try not to give them students to advise their first year, but sometimes out of necessity we do, and so we try to give them the easiest advising assignment, and that’s usually sophomores in the major that they teach in. And the only reason that we don’t give them freshman is that our assistant dean, Dr. Ugochuckwo, is the advisor to the whole freshman class. So, it gets progressively more difficult to advise students the farther that they go through the program and the closer they get to graduation because then we have to really go through and see that they have everything that they need ... So the sophomores are the easiest to advise for somebody new, and so, obviously, whenever a person starts advising ... you’re going to be calling on your colleagues ... or we’re calling Sue Clinton across the hall in records ... and so you actually learn better just by doing it. There is no way to learn it. You can read the lists, you can read the material, you can read the requirements, and then inevitably somebody’s going to come to you with an exception.
Do freshmen still have group advising for their advising session?
When they come in in the fall they have a group advising session, but if they seek out additional advising, Dr. Ugochuckwo will meet with them individually, and what she’s doing this semester for the second semester freshmen, she’s doing individual appointments. That’s a relatively new system for our college that we implemented when she arrived, and this is only her second year, and so she may continue to tweak that system over time, but that’s what we’re currently doing, and then the students as they move into their sophomore year get assigned an advisor in their major. ...
What, if anything, in your opinion, could be improved in the college’s advising?
That’s hard to say. We have made some changes in curriculum in the last couple of years, and we may continue to do so, and that always ... requires any advisor to be very knowledgeable about changes to the major. I think that the advising for this year, next year and so forth, does really require fairly deep knowledge of the requirements within the major. I don’t know specific areas that we need to address. That’s what we’ll find out from the advising survey. ...
Do you know if there’s been a good percentage of participation so far? I know we’re still in advising.
... I would think by know we would have most of them, but I don’t actually know the number. ...
Do you know if the college is planning on any changes in advising, or anything that would affect advising in the near future?
We don’t have any specific plans in lace right now, but we don’t yet have the results from the survey, so depending on what we learn from that we may make some changes, but I don’t know what they would be at this time.
For my research, would there be any chance that I could get data from those surveys?
It’s not that we would hesitate to reveal the information, but what will have to happen though is we’re going to have to turn those forms over to the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment because it was on a scantron form that they created, so it’s going to depend on them. We want to make sure that we’ve almost all of the surveys back before we give it to them to run the analysis. So I don’t know the time frame.
...
I’m doubtful that we’re going to have it turned around right that fast in terms of the results.
...
We would be looking to see what things that we could do better. One thing that we always do is, Sue Clinton from across the hall holds a session every semester for faculty members to get up to speed, let us know of any changes in guidelines. Some things that change are not necessarily the requirements in our major, but university rules ... Other things that might be useful for us to note. ... It’s useful information if suddenly there’s a new minor available. ...
I think we want to make sure we provide faculty advisors with the latest information. If there’re other areas where they need help, or they need more information, it might be something we can do. So, I think we would be looking at any ways we can improve.
Well, we had a survey years ago and I don’t really know why we discontinued using it, but we thought it might be a good idea to try that again. We looked at our old survey and then modified it and asked additional questions. Because we didn’t think it was going to answer everything that we needed to know. We really just wanted a sense of what we’re doing, what we’re doing well, what we could be doing better, are we really meeting students needs in the kind of information we provide. For example, some colleges like Arts & Sciences have professional advisors. We don’t. We rely on a combination of advising from our assistant dean who now advises the freshmen class and faculty members who advise students sophomores through seniors along with advising Sue Clinton provides from the records office and Steve Repati. We wanted to see how well that whole system is working to make sure that we are doing a good job with students because we want students to feel satisfied but also to be assured that they’re taking the right courses. There are many moments, I think, where it’s a bit nerve-wrecking to register for classes. It’s complicated. The university requires competencies in all those knowledge areas, but according to the university they will take any number of courses might fulfill a course,like diverse courses you know here’s a list of about 20 courses. But given which college you’re in, it might make more sense to take one of these than another, and for example in our college, we have a requirement that a student does either a foreign language or two additional diverse cultures classes. So, our students could potentially be taking 3 classes in diverse cultures where somebody else might be taking one. And so you know there’s just enough differences. Any one of a number of math courses could satisfy the mathematical reasoning requirement, but at least two of the majors in our college specifically require stats. And so if you take statistics, you have not only satisfied a requirement for the major and the university, whereas if you just took any math course you may find yourself in a situation where you’re taking one to satisfy the university and one to satisfy the major. So a student has to take two classes. We want to look for those kinds of efficiencies so that students can get by as efficiently as possible. And that’s really important when somebody transfers in and doesn’t start out in our college. After they’ve got 60 credit hours behind them, now they’re declaring a major in our college. We want to make sure that they can get their degree in 128 hours without having to stay longer, take more courses and so forth. There’s just enough complexity about advising that it’s not an easy thing, it’s not easy for students to necessarily wade through all of those requirements and understand the complexities. And so we just wanted to know how we’re doing, if we’ve got certain weaknesses where they might be so we can do the best job possible.
Ok. So what does the college hope that students get out of advising, ideally, after their four years, like what they’re experience was like?
Well, the ideal to me would be that students are getting really good information so that they are taking the right courses so that as they come close to graduation they’ve gotten all the requirements that they need in a comfortable manner. So that they don’t suddenly find out they have more requirements then they thought they had going into their senior year. It’s a lot about knowing the requirements, but it’s also, an advisor can help with career decisions. They may be able to give advice on what would be a better internship opportunity than another. Or should I do an internship, should I not? What do you think about this internship versus that? What area within my major am I likely to find jobs? Things like that, or even sometimes students come in with personal problems or they want advice on should I stay in this class, should I drop it, I don’t know what to do. Will I lose my scholarship if I go below a certain number of hours? There’s just a lot of questions that advisors can answer or at least they can send you to the right person to get the right answer. I would hope that at the end of four years a student would feel that they had a helping hand all the way through that they could go to not only to find out what courses they needed to take, but somebody who could answer all the questions that come up. Should I study abroad or not? Should I do an internship or not? Somebody that they could consult off and on to answer those kinds of questions.
Ok. So, do you know how the university will use those survey results?
We’re doing it for ourself rather than the university. We will probably share that information, we’ll summarize that information and share it with the university, but we’re doing it really for ourself. I don’t know if other colleges that are doing a similar kind of survey. It was just something that we wanted to do for our own benefit. But the way we would look at it is we want to know how we’re doing and particularly any areas where we feel that we are weak, we want to address those the best we can.
So how are you involved in advising? Do you advise any students?
Yes. I’m the associate dean, but I am also one of the advertising faculty members and we have a large number of advertising and PR students. I also advise some public relations students. Those are two majors that have a large number of students and we don’t have enough faculty members. If I were to say, “I’m not doing any advising,” that would put a strain on that department to find enough faculty members to advise advertising and PR students in particular, and also corporate comm students. So I haven’t wanted to put that burden on the faculty members, and so I’ll continue to see advertising students. Usually what we do in our college is a faculty member has all of the say sophomores or juniors or seniors in a particular major. Some faculty members see students in more than one major if there is enough overlap ... But we try to make it fairly narrow because there’s a lot of different requirements that change over the years ... The requirements may be different for all three students, and it’s hard to keep those in mind. So, we try to give each faculty member one discreet cohort of students. I have right now the juniors in advertising, so I will always have a cohort of students that I advise because I’m needed.
Do advisors typically work with career services to tell their students about the opportunities there?
To tell you the truth, I think we rely more on career services to send out announcements to students independently. I’m not sure that all the advisors know everything that career services is doing. They tend to send out, I think they send out email messages, or announcements ... They communicate directly with students. Now, that may be something that should be ... Maybe there’s some opportunities there to work better, hand in hand with career services. So that may be an area for improvement, but I would say that currently we rely on career services to communicate directly with students.
Are students encouraged to explore their options when it comes to majors, minors or different career paths in advising? Can they talk to their advisor?
Oh, certainly they cam talk to their advisor. I’ve had students come to me who were undecided. I’ve had students who were majoring in communications who suddenly think maybe they’re maybe in the wrong major, or want to transfer out of the college. I also see a lot of students who are thinking about transferring into the college and don’t know what major to choose in communications. I tend to see a lot of potential transfer students, but certainly any advisor in the college should be able to help a student if they are thinking of making a change to a major or adding a second major or whatever that is. Now in our college we require a minor and not all colleges do that. So, our faculty members, our advisors, probably know more about minors than a lot of faculty members in other colleges because not all of their students are doing a minor. So a very common question to me is what should I minor in if I’m an ad major, and so, I know the ones that are more typical. Not that a student necessarily have to stay with those. They may have a particular reason for doing something else. Yeah, we have to be fairly knowledgable about the different minors or know where to look it up. ... (talks to student)
Do advisors receive any training before they’re advisors or do they have to work in the college a certain number of years before they advise students?
We usually try to let a new faculty member, we try not to give them students to advise their first year, but sometimes out of necessity we do, and so we try to give them the easiest advising assignment, and that’s usually sophomores in the major that they teach in. And the only reason that we don’t give them freshman is that our assistant dean, Dr. Ugochuckwo, is the advisor to the whole freshman class. So, it gets progressively more difficult to advise students the farther that they go through the program and the closer they get to graduation because then we have to really go through and see that they have everything that they need ... So the sophomores are the easiest to advise for somebody new, and so, obviously, whenever a person starts advising ... you’re going to be calling on your colleagues ... or we’re calling Sue Clinton across the hall in records ... and so you actually learn better just by doing it. There is no way to learn it. You can read the lists, you can read the material, you can read the requirements, and then inevitably somebody’s going to come to you with an exception.
Do freshmen still have group advising for their advising session?
When they come in in the fall they have a group advising session, but if they seek out additional advising, Dr. Ugochuckwo will meet with them individually, and what she’s doing this semester for the second semester freshmen, she’s doing individual appointments. That’s a relatively new system for our college that we implemented when she arrived, and this is only her second year, and so she may continue to tweak that system over time, but that’s what we’re currently doing, and then the students as they move into their sophomore year get assigned an advisor in their major. ...
What, if anything, in your opinion, could be improved in the college’s advising?
That’s hard to say. We have made some changes in curriculum in the last couple of years, and we may continue to do so, and that always ... requires any advisor to be very knowledgeable about changes to the major. I think that the advising for this year, next year and so forth, does really require fairly deep knowledge of the requirements within the major. I don’t know specific areas that we need to address. That’s what we’ll find out from the advising survey. ...
Do you know if there’s been a good percentage of participation so far? I know we’re still in advising.
... I would think by know we would have most of them, but I don’t actually know the number. ...
Do you know if the college is planning on any changes in advising, or anything that would affect advising in the near future?
We don’t have any specific plans in lace right now, but we don’t yet have the results from the survey, so depending on what we learn from that we may make some changes, but I don’t know what they would be at this time.
For my research, would there be any chance that I could get data from those surveys?
It’s not that we would hesitate to reveal the information, but what will have to happen though is we’re going to have to turn those forms over to the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment because it was on a scantron form that they created, so it’s going to depend on them. We want to make sure that we’ve almost all of the surveys back before we give it to them to run the analysis. So I don’t know the time frame.
...
I’m doubtful that we’re going to have it turned around right that fast in terms of the results.
...
We would be looking to see what things that we could do better. One thing that we always do is, Sue Clinton from across the hall holds a session every semester for faculty members to get up to speed, let us know of any changes in guidelines. Some things that change are not necessarily the requirements in our major, but university rules ... Other things that might be useful for us to note. ... It’s useful information if suddenly there’s a new minor available. ...
I think we want to make sure we provide faculty advisors with the latest information. If there’re other areas where they need help, or they need more information, it might be something we can do. So, I think we would be looking at any ways we can improve.