SG leaders: New system more convenient for students
Students in the Darla Moore School of Business will now sign up for advisement using online resources.
Student Government leaders played a heavy role in the switch to online advisement sign-ups, which are starting with advisement registration this week. Business students will save time that would have been spent waiting in the advisement office with a new process that will require only a few clicks to schedule a meeting time with the available adviser of each student’s choice, according to Secretary of Academics Miller Hane.
The system formerly used by the business school required students to sign up for advisement by hand in the business building. Access to advisers was first come, first served.
If students had a class or prior engagement when it came time to sign up, they could be stuck waiting in the advisement office for hours after they arrived, Hane said.
“As a business major myself, I think it’s really convenient,” the second-year business student said. “I can go in and say I want this half-hour block, and I’m finished.”
According to student senate President Pro Tempore Caroline Hendricks, members of SG feel that having so many different processes to access advisers in different schools may not be the best way to arrange these meetings.
“We felt like within the whole entire university, there are some places you sign up on a door, some places you email your professor, some places it’s walk-in — the list goes on and on,” said Hendricks, a fourth-year European studies student. “We felt that it was inconvenient for students to have so many ways to sign up for advisement.”
Having served as the head of the senate academic committee in the 2011–12 school year, Hendricks worked closely with the different schools in order to determine different advisement improvements.
Hendricks said she was surprised the business school decided to switch to an online method because “[Student Government] spoke with them many times last year, and they were very adamant about keeping it to a drop-in system just because they have so many students.”
Hane has also worked closely with the business school, specifically the administrators, to discuss the advisement policy.
“The biggest thing we did was meet with administrators, and we said this is something we’d like to work on, and we all agreed on that,” Hane said. “So it was actually a big push from the administrative side, which may have not been there before.”
To see this initiative through, members of SG, including Hendricks and Hane, worked with Vice Provost and Vice President for Student Affairs Dennis Pruitt, Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Studies Helen Doerpinghaus and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost Michael Amiridis.
Student Body President Kenny Tracy’s original campaign platform included the idea of making the advisement process more efficient. Now that the groundwork has been laid for the new system, SG is waiting on the response from business students on just how efficient the new process is, and their hopes are high.
“Advising reform has always been something people have wanted to do, and it seems like it’s been a prevalent issue,” Hane said. “I think [online registration] will be a much more effective system.”