Academic advisors will be needed to help students implement additional policies that have emerged during the pandemic and are most likely to be available later. Academic advisors can alert students to these opportunities and let them know how taking advantage of them can be beneficial, both now and in the future. If these efforts are deemed unacceptable, students and faculty should consult the University's Academic Integrity Guidelines for more formal complaint procedures. Modern academic counseling involves many things, and your advisor can draw on a wealth of knowledge and experience to help you achieve the most ambitious results while keeping your stress levels manageable.
As an entrepreneur, you trust that you can plan an academic path that prepares you for both short and long-term success. Part of this speculation is which academic departments will survive and what programs and services beyond the classroom will be considered “essential.” Otherwise, higher education academic advisors are available to help students advance in college in a way that maintains their health and well-being while also positioning them for success in their future careers. The challenge for academic counseling is to clearly define its role within academia, especially in light of some speculation that this pandemic will radically change higher education. Higher education academic advisors focus much less on the college admissions process, although their help may still be needed for students hoping to attend graduate school or even enter specific programs as college students.
More than ever, students will need the expertise of well-prepared academic advisors to understand the academic and professional choices they need to make. While the challenge of connecting to the Internet was formidable, academic counseling was one of the first efforts of higher education to adopt technology as a way to complement their work. High school academic advisors, sometimes referred to as guidance counselors, help students determine what classes they will need to take to graduate and how they can take (and succeed) courses that meet their goals for college. Colleges and universities are usually structured around a specialized paradigm, but it's time to recognize that the distinction between mentors, academic trainers and professional counselors may have more to do with preserving professional boundaries and professional identities.
But more importantly, now is the time for the community of academic advisors, together with others from higher education institutions, to envision how the field will work in the future, who should do this work, and what is the best way to obtain the results of academic counseling in what will undoubtedly be an altered environment for higher education. Academic counseling, while considered a unique contribution to university life since the 1970s, is now crucial for institutions to achieve the goals of persistence and timely graduation, in addition to the human goals of self-realization and student growth.
