About Us

The Center for Academic Advising or CAA promotes students' learning and holistic development by empowering them to make decisions and enhancing their virtues of responsibility and self-reflection. At CAA, the Academic Advisors strive to create a community of learners by helping students identify their life, career and educational goals, building trust and relationship with students and collaborating among each other and with different campus offices and resources.

Objectives

1. Promote student learning from academic advising.
2. Support the development of special populations of students.
3. Enhance students' success, engagement and satisfaction with the quality of academic advising services.
4. Improve productivity of and communication with academic advising stakeholders.
5. Provide professional learning opportunities to staff based on CAS Standards for Academic Advising. and Standards of Professional Learning by Learning Forward Association.

What is Academic Advising?

• A developmental process that assists students in the
  • Clarification of their life/career goals
  • Development of educational plans for the realization of these goals
• A decision-making process which assists students in realizing their maximum educational potential through communication and information exchanges with an advisor; it is ongoing, multi-faceted, and the responsibility of both student and advisor

Advisors

The advisor serves as a facilitator of communication, a coordinator of learning experiences through course and career planning and program progress review, and an agent of referral to other campus services as necessary. The advisor is responsible to:

1. Be accessible for meeting with advisees via office hours for advising, telephone, email, or web access.
2. Maintain confidentiality.
3. Understand and effectively communicate the curriculum, graduation requirements, and university and college policies and procedures.
4. Provide students with information about - and strategies for - using the available resources and services on campus.
5. Encourage and guide students as they define and develop realistic goals.
6. Assist students in understanding the purposes and goals of higher education and its effects on their lives and personal goals.
7. Monitor and accurately document students’ progress toward meeting their goals.
8. Encourage and support students as they gain the skills to develop clear and attainable educational plans.
9. Assist students in gaining decision-making, problem-solving, and evaluation skills.