Hello Colleagues,


Last week was awesome.Thank you so much for the time and honesty you brought to all of our sessions and workshops, especially during a peak stretch when your days were already full. 


Across the workshops, six things prevailed as absolutely true across all departments and positions:

1. Advising is bigger than the advising department. It's an ecosystem that touches every place a student lands.
2. Students often reach advising before they're ready. College readiness scores, official transcripts, an ACC EID, and an activated ACC email need to come first.
3. Handoffs are invisible. We need a better way to know what happens after a student is referred somewhere else.
4. Advisors are working across too many screens and systems, and it pulls time away from the student.
5. Welcome Services should be the single front door, with clearer roles for orientation and the first-year experience in the onboarding process.
6. Faculty want to play a critical role in the advising journey sooner in the onboarding journey to ensure that students are on the right track that matters for their completion goals. 

You were just as clear about the advising experience itself. A real session begins with the student's goals and leaves room for the realities shaping their path, not just course selection. And while most (nearly all) of our advisors want the current pre-advising model to go away, there's openness to group advising if advisors have a role in redesigning it, it is aligned by area of study, connected to orientation, and supported by faculty.

Since our time together, we've already been at work. We've followed up with partners across the college - Welcome Services, orientation, application processing, and others - to understand where the handoffs and the readiness work actually live. What you told us is already shaping the framework we're building.

Here's what comes next, and how we're keeping this transparent:

• A short follow-up survey will go to those invited to the Advising Workshops this week. Its purpose is not to ask the same questions again. It reflects back what they told us they wanted, in their own words, and asks them to take each piece one level deeper. It's the step that turns what we heard into the framework itself, so their voice is built directly into what we design. 
• A proposed framework will be ready to present to Dr. Buchanan and the Advisory Team at the end of August. 
• If approved to move forward, we'll bring the framework back to you for feedback before anything is set.
• Nothing will be finalized or launched before January. That gives us the time to get your input right and to train well.

We're on track and following the approval process for this first phase exactly as planned. No surprises and no shortcuts have to happen to meet this milestone.

Thank you for giving us a clear direction. Our job now is to turn what we heard into a model that better supports students and the people advising them.

This is our work, and I'm looking forward to what we are building…together.



Respectfully,

Dr. Monique Johnson-Jones

Associate Vice Chancellor, Academic Advising & Student Planning

Austin Community College | austincc.edu

View as Webpage