Meeting Your Advisees

for sophomore advisers, for fall term

Goals for the First Sophomore Advising Meeting
Will You Be Off Campus during Course Selection Period? Fall or Spring Term?
Follow-up Meetings
Some Suggestions for Ongoing Advising

1. Goals of Sophomore Advising Meetings

You are a sophomore adviser because your advisees, while freshmen, asked you to sign their Sophomore Adviser Forms. The students chose you because of the courses you teach, shared academic interests, your previous relationship through freshman advising, their enrollment in one of your courses, or your role as DUS in the department he or she plans to major in. Regardless of the reason, there is a basis for your sophomore advising relationship and, in general, both faculty members and students find sophomore advising to be very satisfying.

Unlike the early freshman advising meetings, which typically occur in group settings in the residential college dining halls and are organized by the residential college deans, you are in charge of contacting your sophomore advisees, organizing your meetings with them, and setting the time and location (usually, your faculty office). Students should instead take responsibility for contacting you, you say? Hear, hear! However, experience shows that, when left to their own devices, students will wait until the eleventh hour to contact their sophomore advisers, ensuring that little actual advising takes place.

Sophomore advisers’ meetings with their sophomore advisees are usually one-on-one, but it should be noted that some sophomore advisers also schedule group meetings, especially when all of their advisees plan on the same major, with reports of high satisfaction on both sides.

One focus of your first meeting with your sophomore advisees should be on welcoming them and learning about their plans for the current year and the years to come. We suggest that you begin by telling your advisees something about yourself —

who you are
how long you have been at Yale
your academic field
personal interests that you care to share (music, sports, and hobbies will all be of interest to them).

Then have them introduce themselves. They might tell you something about last year’s courses, their background (hometown, family, high school), or other interests. You might ask them to reflect on their freshman year, or talk about what they look forward to accomplishing as sophomores, academically and otherwise. Try to get a sense of their tentative long-range plans (business, public service, law, medicine, graduate school, etc.), understanding that many of them will change their course even as sophomores.

To the extent that you delve into the realm of academics and course selection, you should keep in mind some overarching goals. Ask your students the kinds of questions they should keep in mind as they build a sophomore year course schedule.

what are their goals for the year?
have they determined a major and begun working towards it?
are they on track with their distributional requirements?
are there fields they would still like to explore?
have they considered study abroad?

You may see possibilities that have not occur to them. Suggest to them that this second year builds on the adjustment process of freshman year; that it still contains the possibility of exploring new academic and extracurricular interests; and yet, by the end of the year, they should have hit on a major field of study.

You will begin to develop personal relationships with your advisees during your advising sessions. Another focus of these sessions should be on making connections. You are in a position to direct them towards faculty colleagues, campus centers or research groups, and campus resource offices that will help them fulfill and expand their goals for their Yale educations.

Of course, some students will come to your advising meetings with a list of courses that they want to explore during course selection period (a.k.a. “shopping”). This might provide a good opportunity to use whatever they bring you as a way to think about the composition of their fall term schedules in broader terms.

Some general things to look out for:

Ask them how they came up with that particular group of courses to shop. This may lead to an interesting conversation about what they are looking for—or whether there is something they are overlooking.
Are they simply repeating the same kind of schedule they took last year? If so, you can help them to think about other possibilities that might be of interest.
Is the number of courses they intend to shop reasonable?
If you don’t see a small class on their schedule, you might encourage them to consider taking one.
If they are potential STEM majors, are they tracking their requirements accurately?

At the end of your first meeting with your advisees, let them know that you will be meeting with them at least one more time for a follow-up meeting to discuss and sign their final course schedule. A shorter meeting with you in the interim — say after a week of classes — will help some advisees to clarify their thoughts.

2. Will You Be Off Campus during Course Selection Period? During the Fall or Spring Term?

When you agree to be a sophomore adviser in April, you may not know your exact schedule for the following August/September or January, or the fall or spring term. If you discover last-minute that you are unable to advise because an unforeseen conflict (a conference or a research trip, a leave, etc.), please alert your sophomore advisees immediately so that they may make alternative arrangements, notifying their residential college deans as well.

It is best not to sign on as a sophomore adviser if you know ahead of time in the spring that you will be off campus or unavailable during course selection period, for a term, or for the year,

3. Follow-up Meetings

It is recommended that you meet with each of your sophomore advisees twice during course selection period and before schedules are due.

The first, lengthier meeting will be dedicated to getting to know them as people and as students; their plans and goals for the fall term; ideas about possible or actual areas of concentration or the major; and a discussion of which and how many courses they are “shopping” this term, and why (students should be discouraged from shopping at excess number of courses, say, more than 8-9). This meeting is best held towards the beginning of course selection period, as that is the moment when their ideas may still be fluid and your advice will be most effective.

The second meeting should be held towards the end of course selection period to review your advisees’ final (or nearly final) schedules, check for radical changes in direction since your previous meeting, and, if you are satisfied with the outcome, sign their schedules.

You will want to help undecided students plan a schedule that keeps their options open for their eventual choice of a major, while referring students with specific departmental interests to directors of undergraduate studies (especially potential STEM majors), your colleagues in other departments, or to residential college deans. Do not hesitate to refer students with specific questions about distributional requirements, acceleration, and premedical requirements to the dean, if you are not able to answer them yourself.

Your advisees may need you to help them appreciate the need to strike a balance between academic commitments and extracurricular opportunities. In some cases, this will mean asking whether they have gotten themselves overly involved in clubs and activities. While all of our students juggle complicated schedules, some may find that the ways in which they managed their time in their first year do not work in their second. You can help them think about new ways to approach their work that may be more appropriate. In other cases, you will need to help your advisees avoid overly ambitious course loads.

It is particularly important that students considering a major in the STEM fields continue (or, in some cases, begin) the appropriate course sequences during the sophomore year.

Be sure your students leave this meeting with a clear sense of when you will be available for a final meeting before the course schedule deadline so that you can sign their schedules.

4. Some Suggestions for Ongoing Advising

Midterm

Take the opportunity to check in with your advisees before the mid-term deadline (see the Yale College Calendar with Pertinent Deadlines). Invite them to join you for lunch in your residential college or set up advising office hours. You might discuss study habits, efficient organization of their work-week, and realistic allotment of study time to different types of courses.

You may learn that a student is struggling and has not thought about getting a tutor for a given course. Or it may be that the best way for a student to manage a difficult situation is to drop a course, or limit extracurricular involvement. By building on the relationships you established in the first few weeks, you can find out more about how your advisees are faring in their ongoing transition to college life.

End-of-term

As you can imagine, stress levels run high at the end of the term.

Your sophomore advisees would benefit from an encouraging email from you, should you care to send one. You might offer your help, or perhaps suggest a lunchtime meeting or a coffee break to discuss study strategies. You might also let them know — if it’s the fall — that you look forward to seeing them again in January to discuss and sign their spring schedules. If it’s the spring, you might let them know that you enjoyed advising them and offer your services as an informal adviser, especially if they will major in your field.

What you write is not as important as the very fact that you have written. Some advisees respond to our efforts to reach out and some don’t. Regardless, please know that your efforts as part of their “constellation of advisers” are important and appreciated.