Last Friday, Vice Provost and Associate Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education Mary Kraus announced that Shelly Bacon is moving into a new role as Assistant Vice Provost for Advising and Academic Services. Bacon has been a leader in the College of Arts & Sciences advising center for 16 years, serving as an advisor, a director of advising, and more recently as assistant dean of advising. CU Boulder Today sat down with Bacon to discuss advising and other student support services on campus.
This campus-level advising role that you’ve moved into is new for CU Boulder. What does it mean?
Currently, academic advising is housed in each of the colleges on campus. And it’s important that each of our colleges, which are so unique in their respective disciplines and missions, should be very involved in advising. But at the same time, advisors across campus have been working together for some time now to create a more collaborative and consistent approach to how we advise students and share resources. We’ve been headed in this direction already because collaborating with one another and using similar processes enables us to create a seamless experience for students. So you might think of this new campus role as a formalization of that work that has been underway.
You said that a collaborative advising model is expected to enhance the student experience. How is that?
As I mentioned, each college is different. They teach different disciplines, and they prepare students to enter very different fields. However, our campus and our students have changed a lot in the last 20 years. Students are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary in their approach and their academic interests, and yet much of our approach to advising remains somewhat siloed. We hope that by deploying a more collaborative approach among not just advisors, but the many student support staff across campus who are engaging with students outside of the classroom (in Career Services, athletics, Residence Life), we will enable our advising teams to take a holistic look at a student’s academic and co-curricular interests. Students can have more seamless conversations about complementary aspects of their experience, and advisors can be better positioned to develop relationships with our students and engage them in conversations that matter.
What about students who are undecided or between majors?
Those students who have interdisciplinary interests or who decide to change from one major to another or, quite commonly, one college to another, actually stand to benefit the most from a campuswide approach to advising. In fact, many of our Open Option students are interested in exploring possibilities that span college boundaries, and Open Option represents a significant portion of our entering first-year student population.
Currently, when a student transfers from one of our colleges to another, advisors in the new college may not have easy access to the student’s previous system of advising. In a lot of ways, the student has to “start over,” which can be frustrating to students who have already been telling their story for a year or more. By having all of our advisors using the same tools and processes, we’ll be able to support our students throughout their entire academic journey, with understanding of what they’ve accomplished and discussed in different colleges and departments across campus.
This sounds like a big change that will take time to accomplish. What are some of the early things you hope to get done?
Right. Many of these changes will depend on a lot of people coming together and figuring out creative solutions to some of our current challenges, many of which are not trivial. But there are a few things that the advising community has already been discussing: for example, creating a common salary structure for advisor positions across campus and creating a career ladder for our advisors that is consistent across campus. I also think we could look at developing a common training program for onboarding new advisors (with each college likely providing customized content that is unique to its students).
You mentioned that this work has already been underway. Can you share how advisors have been collaborating?
We have been working for the past couple of years to create a campuswide advising tool that can serve the needs of all advisors and students on campus. The tool, called MyCUHub, allows advisors to manage their student relationships, including reviewing student information, scheduling appointments, sending messages, entering notes, etc.
However, MyCUHub is not yet meeting the needs of every advising unit, and not everyone is using it as a result. This is one of our biggest short-term challenges.
One of the first things that we need to work on as a campus is resetting with MyCUHub. We need to start thinking about it as a tool that is for more than just advising. Advising is just one part of student success, and we cannot take an advising-centric approach to building this tool. For example, we need to think about how we can build MyCUHub in such a way that supports New Student Welcome, the Athletic Department, Disability Services, Career Services, and many more units as we move forward. We hope that if we build this tool in a collaborative way, it will be useful to all of us, and we will all want to use it. And we need to be successful because this will be a key tool in the toolbox to help us take a holistic approach to a variety of student support functions.
What are your plans to get this work underway?
This is really about collaboration. My goal is that all of us who are engaged in the work of advising students, whether in a traditional advising role or in any position of support and mentorship, will view ourselves as part of a community—a community that shares resources and best practices and that comes together to articulate a shared vision of student success.
Specifically related to the MyCUHub project, I think we need to continue to identify which tools and approaches are common to us all and, if shared, would most benefit our service to students. From a project perspective, we’re taking a step back and resetting our approach. In many ways, the first year of utilizing MyCUHub has been quite successful. However, with time it will become more robust, and I think that a few key structural enhancements are going to help us really see some growth in terms of this becoming a holistic tool: closer collaborations across multiple functional areas, focus groups with students, and a streamlined governance structure to collect and prioritize development requests. We have also established several working teams to ensure cross-campus collaboration and improved communication.
If you’re interested in learning more, I am hosting a town hall Tuesday, Oct. 11, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. in the the Norlin Library British Studies Room. During the event we will review the MyCUHub project and highlight how it will unfold in the coming months.
