In Review

Students who once saved existential questions for philosophy class are increasingly asking them in places such as the College Center for Advising Services.

The paths leading to the center’s home at 312 Lattimore Hall are among the most well trod on the River Campus. In its labyrinth of rooms, as well as in nearby corridors, a team of more than 20 professional academic advisors help students on matters from the mundane—should I take this class on the S/F option?—to the fundamental—is this major, these plans, these ideas I’ve adopted, really who I am?

The center, known by its acronym CCAS, sits at the hub of a network of offices staffed with professionals who work collaboratively to help college students take advantage of opportunities they might not know about, and to get assistance when they need it. (You can find a list of them on the Web at Rochester.edu/studentlife/services.html.) During the 2015–16 academic year, CCAS advisors held more than 5,000 face-to-face meetings with students, and responded to thousands more e–mail and telephone queries from students, faculty, and other University staff.

Marcy Kraus is the director of the center as well as the dean of freshmen. The parent of an alumnus herself (her daughter, Leah, graduated in 2009), Kraus has worked in CCAS advising students since 1999. Her training includes a doctorate in psychology, which is fitting, considering that students will often approach academic advisors with complex personal problems.

“The range of concerns that students bring to us are much greater,” she says, than in previous generations. “Students have health issues, mental health issues, family and personal concerns, and a lot of financial concerns.”

In some ways, the skills of a good advisor are similar to those of a good clinician. In addition to knowing the academic rules of the College and the resources available to students, a good advisor, according to Kraus, “is able to listen without judgment, demonstrate empathy, and recognize how to effectively help students who are struggling with difficult situations.”

Kraus took over leadership of CCAS in 2009, after founding director Suzanne O’Brien took on other roles as associate dean of the College. O’Brien retired from the University this summer (see “Farewell, and Meliora,” facing page), leaving her position as associate dean to Alan Czaplicki, and endowing her former position at CCAS. Later this fall, Kraus will assume the title of Suzanne Jagel O’Brien Director of the College Center for Advising Services.

O’Brien began advising students in the early 1970s, working with Miriam (Mim) Rock ’42, then an assistant to the dean. When O’Brien was named the first director of a newly formed academic advising office, among her early actions was successfully petitioning to change the classification of the academic advisor position from secretarial to professional. Professional academic advising was relatively new at the time, though, and not everyone was sold on the idea.

“Faculty in general were very skeptical of staff people—humph!—doing advising,” says O’Brien. “We worked very hard to establish the advising office as a place where students and faculty alike could get reliable, accurate, and useful information, always based on the rules set by the faculty.”

Attitudes have changed starkly since then. “The expectation now is that professional advisors know how to do the job, and the faculty contact the advisors to find out what the rules are,” she says.

There have been additional changes, both in the student population and in students’ approach to their education. While the center’s advisors have long made meeting the needs of underrepresented minority students a priority—working with staff in the Office of Minority Student Affairs to do so—diversity has increased more recently in other categories, such as international students, to name just one.

“The advising staff has grown because we’ve been asked to take on a greater level of responsibility for individual populations of students,” Kraus says. In working with an increasingly multicultural student body, advisors need what she calls “cultural competence,” while also guarding against assumptions about individual students that are based on broad demographic data.

Undergraduates also worry about their career prospects. That’s not necessarily new, but Kraus notes that students are taking on more significant levels of debt than in the past. Understandably, she says, they want to choose majors they’re confident will pay off. Widely held assumptions about particular majors, however, often are not supported by data or by the experiences of many alumni. But merely repeating data and anecdotes doesn’t effectively address students’ concerns either.

“The 21st-century academic advisor needs to be able to talk to students realistically, but confidently” about career prospects, says Kraus. This year, she’s working with Joe Testani, the director of the Gwen M. Greene Career and Internship Center, to expand collaborations between the two offices. Career and academic advisors have traditionally held separate conversations with students. Academic advisors have tended to see part of their role as encouraging students to view their liberal education as something valuable and important apart from their career goals.

Kraus offers a hint of how such coordination might go, through a story about a student who came to see her last year. The student badly wanted to study Japanese, but was afraid of what her parents might say. Kraus and a counterpart in the Greene Center worked together to help her see “that if you want to major in Japanese, there’s a place for you in the job market.

“We want to do a better job of helping students connect the dots,” Kraus says.

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Vice President, Senior Advisor to the President, and University Dean Paul Burgett interviewed O’Brien for the University’s Living History Project in 2014. The videotaped interview, along with a transcription, can be found at http://livinghistory.lib.rochester.edu/obrien.