Assigning All Incoming Students a Career Adviser

New for 2015–16, all first-year students were assigned an adviser from the Center for Careers, Life, and Service (CLS). The purpose is to integrate the CLS into students’ lives as soon as possible, so that students can take full advantage of the resources, programs, and CLS advisers in an intentional way.

“The more we can engage with first-year students early in their time at Grinnell, the more likely they are to come back [to the CLS],” says Mark Peltz, Daniel ’77 and Patricia Jipp ’80 Finkelman Dean of the CLS.

The CLS advising staff met with incoming first-years in several large group sessions during New Student Orientation. Students participated in an activity that asked them to identify their top 10 values from a set of 44 value cards. Each card included one value and a brief definition such as “Duty: to carry out my duties and obligations” and “Creativity: to have new and original ideas.”

Family, friendship, passion, purpose, and knowledge were the five most commonly cited values, says Megan Crawford, director of career counseling and exploration at the CLS. The purpose of the activity was to help students start thinking about their values and how those values are reflected in their decision-making, she says.

“What I love about this activity,” Peltz says, “is it’s directly linked to our mission, which is empowering students and alumni to live, learn, and work with meaning and purpose. How can you do that if you don’t have an understanding of what’s important to you?”

To help reinforce this notion, students met individually with their career advisers for a follow-up appointment during the fall semester. “It’s a relational approach,” Crawford says. During the individual session, adviser and student discussed how one of the student’s values affected a recent decision.

“Many [students] cited their decision to come to Grinnell,” Crawford says. “Whether [the value] was adventure or travel or even self-knowledge, [students] seem to understand the concept of those decision-making processes.”

Each student also selected one personal, professional, or civic goal to work on this year, such as setting up a job-shadow experience, creating a personal advisory committee, or taking a career or personality assessment.

There was one result the CLS didn’t foresee — helping a couple of first-year students who were seriously struggling with whether they belong at Grinnell. “We’ve reached out to their RLCs [residence life coordinators] and their faculty advisers,” Crawford says, to make sure those students “were on their radars.”

“This new initiative has tightened the weave,” Peltz says. “It’s harder for a student to slip through and not get noticed. Early signs are that it’s effective.”

Crawford says the new program is also spurring a more integrated adviser approach. CLS has shared the student learning outcomes as well as the activities from both the individual and group sessions with the First-Year Tutorial professors, who are students’ faculty advisers, to provide an understanding of the CLS approach.

“There’s a real strong appetite from first-year students for this kind of connection,” Peltz says. “Some upper-class students who’ve learned about this initiative have asked, ‘When do I get my CLS adviser?’ It’s an affirming message but also speaks to the challenges. How will we fully sustain this as a four-year integrated advising approach as an institution?”

Peltz says that next spring, the CLS will evaluate data from this first year to help determine next steps. Meanwhile all students are welcome at the CLS.