Committee Members From This Past Year

• Mike Saldana (Chair)
• Nick Woodward (Vice Chair)
• Meg Marshall (Secretary)

Vacancies for F21/W22

Secretary (3 year term)

As the inaugural committee, what things did you learn as a group?

Prior to the start of the 2020-2021 academic year, the LAAN Executive Committee met to talk through expectations for the first year. Part of that conversation centered on setting reasonable goals for what was soon to be a challenging year. At the advising start-up meeting, we introduced LAAN as well as the different committees that would begin work in the Fall. Overall, the biggest thing we learned is that when given the opportunity, advisors can work together to achieve great things.
Being the inaugural year, the rollout of LAAN did not go as we had expected. COVID deprived us of the opportunity to make a splash at start-up and create the energy we wanted. Fortunately, advisors were able to provide some of that energy through their enthusiasm and committee participation. All in all, we learned that advisors on-campus will rise to the occasion and meet the needs of their colleagues.

What accomplishments did your committee achieve during this past academic year? Projects and initiatives worked on?

We began the year by meeting with each of the committees to outline their purpose and objectives for the year. We continued to meet monthly with committee chairs as a way to offer support as they worked throughout the year. We created a direct line to the Undergraduate Academic Advising Leadership Council (UAALC) with the chair attending each meeting representing LAAN. We also established a monthly meeting schedule with AVP Suzeanne Benet as a way to advocate for LAAN and create a culture of collaboration.
During the Fall semester, Provost Cimitile and AVP Benet were tasked with creating a presentation on how academic advising works at the university for President Mantella and the Senior Leadership Team (SLT). In conjunction with UAALC, the executive committee created presentation slides, a meeting handout, and a Q&A document for Provost Cimitile and AVP Benet to use during their presentation. Both the Provost and the AVP expressed gratitude and appreciation for the time spent and quality of the materials they were given.
In addition to the four standing committees, we also created the TSAR committee during the Fall semester. UAALC identified transfer student registration as an area that needed to be re-defined. They sought a committee to implement recommendations they had been given to change certain aspects of the student experience. We were able to fill that committee with advisors representing a breadth of centers. Knowing that budgets were tight and travel was not allowed, we were able to send two members of the Standards Committee to a virtual assessment conference. Their participation at the conference helped the committee learn the process of how to create meaningful student learning outcomes as well as insight on how to assist centers in doing the same.

What work will you carry over that was unfinished to the next academic year?

As part of LAAN’s proposal, we hoped to offer advisors additional funding opportunities to attend professional conferences. We understand that not every college provides access to funding as well as the fact that it’s not equal across the board. Our hope was to provide some outside assistance to advisors during the 2020/2021 academic year. Because of COVID, we were unable to offer any grant opportunities. In collaboration with AVP Benet, we hope to provide opportunities in future years.
We also will spend time during the spring/summer semester meeting with units within the Divisions of Student Affairs and Enrollment Management. We will spend that time introducing them to LAAN and creating a more formal way of sharing information. Currently, a lot of that information sharing is done informally. We hope to provide those units with a landing place they can turn to when changes come about. It’s vital for advisors to have the most up to date information as they’re meeting with students.
Lastly, we will spend time planning our start-up meeting in August. The meeting will take place on Mon Aug 16 from 9-11 a.m. A save the date was sent out to the LAAN membership in late April alerting them of the meeting. We will work with UAALC and AVP Benet to finalize the agenda and ensure we are able to meet safely according to university policy.

How did COVID-19 impact your committee work this year?

Because of COVID, we were forced to meet virtually through Zoom. While Zoom does not take the place of a face-to-face meeting, it did make it easier to set up a meeting schedule. Not having to travel to different campuses allowed us to make efficient use of our monthly meeting time.
As stated above, COVID impacted our ability to offer grants to advisors to attend conferences. While our Training & Development committee offered timely and relevant sessions during the Winter semester, we plan to have a more robust offering in the 2021/2022 academic year.
COVID was most certainly a challenge during the 2020/2021 academic year. But it did not stop us from accomplishing some of our goals. We were able to fill committees, create high quality materials for the SLT, and begin the process of improving our advising services on-campus.