Tracking Thoughts: Building the Peer Advising Program
Early in the fall semester my new director pulled me into his office and ran a new idea by me…the creation of a peer advising program for the advising office.
It is not a new idea to the university and is certainly not a new idea to advising centers across the nation. Peer advisors can quickly, efficiently and cheaply supplement advising loads.
The kicker here is it has to be done right. It can’t be thrown together and the peer advisors released to the wild without a guiding hand. But rather, through effective training and education, help can be on the way.
My advising office currently has a peer advisor. She is a graduate assistant who assumed those duties during a reorganization of the office. To be honest, without her seeing students during this reorganization, advisors would have gone insane, buried under an caseload of students searching for answers.
By definition she is a peer advisor, an advisor who is a current student of the university helping fellow students navigate the waters of academia. Her job duties have adjusted and evolved over time from advising pre-major students to advising transfers to advising prospective students to handling course evaluations for transfer students. But when you match up the idea of a peer advisor in literature, you quickly see that she was not your traditional peer advisor.
Now my new director comes from a university where the peer advisor program in his academic unit was a smash hit. It connected with students and it was a popular position that students wanted to take. Not only did their work supplement that of the advisors, it allowed the advisors to focus their time and energy on the bigger advising appointments. There is nothing like running into a scheduled 30 minute appointment only to have a student ask a single question that takes 30 seconds to answer. Always a head scratcher.
So we set off to explore the possibility of bringing a group of peer advisors to our advising office. And as such, I figure this is the perfect opportunity to share my thoughts along the way as we institute a peer advisor program for our office. I have been through a couple of stages already (had to make sure it was going to happen), so bear with me as I catch you up.
Phase 1: Initial Concept and Design
It is always hard to see the end when you are at the beginning of such a large undertaking. In a land of limited resources, large advising caseloads and a desire to better serve our students, we had to somehow find a way keep the advisors’ time focused on the bigger issues.
Far too often advisor schedules were booked a week or two out. That led to high no show rates and students making an appointment for issues that might be able to be sorted in a much quicker fashion. It was a slow moving snowball going downhill. Wait times just got longer and longer without the underlying problems taking care of themselves.
My director pulled me aside and showed me how the peer advisor program had worked at his previous advising unit. It seemed to possibly alleviate many of the problems we were looking at. And even better, it had met with success at the other university with both advisors and students. A program which served as front line advisors, and even a filter for the professional advisors, worked well to serve the immediate needs of the quick answer needing students and to connect those who needed the in depth advising appointments with their advisor.
So as all great programs do, we borrowed the idea and structure.
Phase 2: Program Approval and Funding
It is one thing to want to something, it is another thing to actually do it. There are many models to a peer advising program that exist. Some are completely voluntary. Some have a basis in an academic class. Others pay their peer advisors. The program we modeled ours after paid their advisors. Well that is a high hurdle to try and jump when you start talking about money.
Both my director and I were onboard. Who were we to argue we didn’t need help and this seem to hit the right spot? But the addition of money to the equation moved the idea above both of us to our associate dean for academics. And in a neverending request to add more advisors to the office to balance caseload, this was just another straw on the budget’s back.
So there needed to be a way to minimize cost while maximizing manpower. That meant part time workers (no benefits) at low wages (student workers). Nevermind that is exactly what we intended to use anyways. Students filling the role of peer advisors make sense. They connect to fellow students in a different way than the professional advisors do. Its a benefit of the program.
In the end we got 80 hours to split among however many we hire. We figure always one on duty to compliment our administrative assistant. During the heavier traffic times we should be able to tack on another one to cover. In theory, not a bad start.
Phase 3: Recruiting
Now that we had the go ahead, we had to see who we wanted to fill these positions. We knew we wanted the basic personable peer advisor who brought energy to the position. But there were a couple of other things we specifically wanted as well:
- Had to be a full major student or be in high academic standing if a pre-major.
- Had to agree to attend a set weekly training meeting.
- Agreeing to work through standard student holidays.
- Positive outlook.
- Ability to serve as a role model.
Along with a basic application we asked them to provide written answers to a couple of questions to give us insight to the communication skills and writing ability as well as knowledge of the program. Then we asked for two letters of reference as well.
Looking back we packed this into about four weeks of recruiting. It was pretty tight and we only received back 14 application packages, but we had to move to get the program up and running.
That brings us to the past couple of days. We identified ten candidates from the pool and brought them into interviews. It was all around an impressive group. It was your basic 20 minute interview of stock questions, schedule review and allowing them to ask us questions. Although we cannot take them all, it definitely looks to be a good starting group for this infant peer advisor program.
And now my attention is shifting to phase four…training. We have our initial training meeting on Friday. I am going to see what else I can borrow from others for the training.
I will let you know how that turns out.
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