(447d) Academic and Career Advising to Maximize Student Degree Completion

The academic advising of students is a critical component to their successful attainment of graduation with a BS degree in engineering, while engaging the student in career discussions can impact the student’s success in attaining their first full time professional position. Our Hispanic-serving institution is a regional university with a long-standing and historic engineering program that serves to produce many engineers in our region of the state. However, as a regional, non-Tier 1 institution, with a 2.25 engineering course GPA requirement for graduation, our engineering academic departments must handle a wide range of academic capabilities in required engineering courses. Long gone are the days of freshman engineering or math instructors intoning the mantra to incoming freshman to “look to your left and to your right, and note that only one of you three will be sitting here come graduation time in four years”. Retention of admitted students at all levels is a high priority in our institution.

Most recently, our College of Engineering utilized professional advisors to advise underclassmen students academically while they completed their STEM preparation courses, after which students “graduated” to advising with a faculty member for the rest of their undergraduate academic career. In just the past year, the college has changed this approach, so as to be in line with the rest of the university. In the new model, the students are advised by a professional advisor for the entirety of their undergraduate academic career, with select departmental faculty providing direction to the professional advisor for challenging cases. Select departmental faculty are also designated to provide career advising to the students at the student’s request. In both approaches to advising, this faculty member has found that taking time for extended discussions and mapping out suitable course paths with a student that has challenges to completing their academic requirements to graduate usually results in the greatest success for the student. Retention trends within our department will be discussed as the measure of success with our college’s new approaches to student advising.