Advising & Supporting

Advising and Supporting has been a competency that I’ve had the opportunity to develop in different capacities within my assistantship. First, within the College of Engineering, I’ve had the opportunity to advise a small caseload of students with probation status. Within these meetings, I’ve made the effort to, not only focus on students’ academic progress, but also on their personal development. The outcome of these agreements is to ultimately increase students’ personal accountability in regards to academics in order to increase their semester grade point average (GPA) from the previous semester. Within this outcome are multiple objectives including increased personal accountability and responsibility, and increased GPA.  Being able to identify  issues or challenges that students are facing, provide resources, and follow up regularly with students around these issues allows me to “pursue multiple objectives,” and work to be a “culturally inclusive” adviser and supporter of these students (ACPA & NASPA, 2015, p. 37). Intentionally individualizing my weekly meetings with these students has been helpful in developing this competency. 

Advising and Supporting has been a competency that I’ve had the opportunity to develop in different capacities within my assistantship. First, within the College of Engineering, I’ve had the opportunity to advise a small caseload of students with probation status. Within these meetings, I’ve made the effort to, not only focus on students’ academic progress, but also on their personal development. The outcome of these agreements is to ultimately increase students’ personal accountability in regards to academics in order to increase their semester grade point average (GPA) from the previous semester. Within this outcome are multiple objectives including increased personal accountability and responsibility, and increased GPA. Furthermore, in order to achieve each of these goals, I must inquire about their personal development that may be effecting their academic performance. For example, quite a few of the first-year students that I have advised have indicated that making the recent transition to college has been a contributing factor to their probation status. In addition this, some students indicate having health problems, dissonance towards their major, or even the college atmosphere, or difficulty finding social support networks. Being able to identify these issues, provide resources, and follow up regularly with students around these issues allows me to “pursue multiple objectives,” and work to be a “culturally inclusive” adviser and supporter of these students (ACPA & NASPA, 2015, p. 37). Intentionally individualizing my weekly meetings with these students has been helpful in developing this competency.
In addition to this, working with the Peer Mentors in the College of Engineering has allowed me increase my competence in this area, specifically during our Progress Meetings throughout the semester. This is an opportunity for the mentors to ask questions about their experiences as a mentor, and a student leader, and for me to provide guidance in navigating those experiences. In doing so, we often indicate which skills are necessary to further develop as a mentor, and what activities can be done in order to do so. As a group we set goals for the type of mentor they would like to be, the kinds of skills they would like to develop, and the kind of relationship that they wish to establish with their mentees. As a group, this is a powerful tool in allowing the mentors to see that have similar needs as peer mentors, and that they have the ability to process these thoughts together. It has been helpful for my competency development to be able to facilitate these group meetings and processes in order to ensure that the peer mentors can be effectives in their role as peer mentors within the college.

Organizational & Human Resources

Although I feel confident in my understanding of the Organizational and Human Resources competency based on the different interactions that I have had with staff hiring, campus policies and procedures, supervision, and crisis management, it is still a competency in which I wish to be exemplary. Two specific examples that I feel have contributed to my proficiency thus far in Organizational and Human Resources have been my participation in the Student Affairs Response Team (SART) at Ohio Northern, and my role as a supervisor as a Resident Director. Both positions have given me the opportunity to learn more about supervision, policy and procedure, and crisis management, in particular.
As a Resident Director, I was able to serve as supervisor for not only the undergraduate staff in my building, but also for paraprofessional staff within the on-campus apartments, and in some instances student staff in other areas. Specifically in my building, I had the opportunity to demonstrate various supervisory skills, including providing feedback in a timely manner, oversight of various projects, conflict management, goal setting, and decision making to name a few. Being able to work with a smaller staff allowed me to focus on specific skills regarding supervision in order to further my understanding of the role of a Resident Director at this specific institution. However, being able to work with a larger staff presented a challenge in understanding my role within a department team. However, each of these experiences allowed me to explore my own supervisory style and develop my understanding of this role amongst the organizational flow chart within student affairs. Serving in this position has developed my competency in this area by emphasizing the important of function within each role and how roles may change or differ between institution, or when working in teams across campus.
Lastly, as a member of the SART committee within the Division of Student Affairs, I had the opportunity to learn about various campus crises, appropriate responses, and how each office works together to respond to a situation. Each week, all members of the division come together to discuss different issues on campus including mental health awareness initiatives, students of concern, or the status of specific conduct cases. This has been beneficial to my development in this competency because I have been able to articulate campus protocols for crises that occur on campus. Furthermore, being trained by the SART committee, and having the ability to ask questions about policies, procedures, and protocol across the institution has been helpful. Most recently, the committee has been drafting various plans for suicide prevention and post-vention initiatives in order to ensure that the campus is abiding by the state laws regarding mental health awareness and response. I feel confident in my ability to articulate the different roles that each division has in its response to crises, and how one should respond to various crises in my specific position. At Ohio Northern, specifically, I have had the opportunity to really understand the roles of the SART team in responding to the concerns of all campus members (including faculty, staff, and students), reaching out to the appropriate office, serving as a support for the student of concern, and following up with the appropriate offices.

Personal & Ethical Foundations

For development in this competency, reflection on one’s self in regards to personal experiences and the nature of the profession is necessary. One activity that was helpful in facilitating reflection upon these topics has been the first assignment in the Capstone course, the Personal Statement of Mission paper. In this paper, identifying most salient personal values and how they interact with my professional identity, as a student affairs practitioner, was helpful in understanding how to develop and maintain my personal and professional values simultaneously. While I may not have written about areas of dissonance between my values and the profession, this assignment served as a catalyst for me to begin considering incongruences between the two. Because of this, I know that my values will inevitably conflict with some of the work that I will do within student affairs, but I also realize that value in being a person of integrity and plan to practice making various decisions while keeping my values and beliefs intact. This assignment was one of many that encouraged me to do more reflection on who I am as an individual and as a professional and how they might differ. It was a great introduction into understanding how to balance personal and professional beliefs and values when making ethical decisions in the field.
In addition to the Capstone assignment, some of my personal interests have contributed to my development within this competency, one of which has been my hobby of journal writing. While I have not been consistent with my journal writing since beginning graduate school, over the summer, this was a goal that I set for myself. Over the summer, while on the Study Tour and through the rest of my time away from Ohio, I was able to write and reflect on my experiences. I reflected on the peaks and valleys of the summer, goals, ways to achieve those goals, personal values, and most importantly, how I would tackle my last year of graduate school. I was able to make connections and examine what I had experienced and set expectations for my future. ACPA & NASPA (2015) list defining excellence and understanding “how one’s sense of excellence impacts self and others” (p. 17) as a criteria of development within this competency. By being able to set time aside daily and speak to my own thoughts about what I wanted out of my experiences going into my second year of graduate school, I had the ability to set expectations for my personal excellence in the future, and how to achieve this. In some ways this meant connecting with different people, focusing more on specific projects, or setting boundaries for work, school, job search and the extracurricular activities. Setting these goals and expectations for myself allowed me to enter the second year with a sense of determination and feeling motivated to make the most of a second year and prepare for a full time position.

Assessment, Evaluation, & Research

The development of this competency during my graduate experience was introduced first in theCSP 6035, Multicultural Competence in Student Affairs, course after designing and implementing a program, and later elaborated on in CSP 6040, Educational Outcomes of American Colleges and Universities, when creating my Intervention and Assessment plan for an institution. In both of these course projects, the emphasis was placed on the importance of evaluation and action after completing an assessment. In CSP 6035, I was able to design my pre- and post-assessments based on which methodologies I felt would best reflect the data that I wanted collect. In addition to this, I also had to consider my audience and how I formatted the assessments in order to get the feedback that most representative of the desired outcomes. In this particular project, I was working with engineering students. After, having a little bit of experience within this college, I was aware that qualitative data was not going to be as easy to collect as quantitative data. Thus, the assessments implemented included questions that would render both qualitative and quantitative data. However, most of the questions were in Likert scale format due to their disinterest in qualitative data. This process was successful and following the data collection, we were able to analyze their responses to each question and make suggestions for how to improve or structure the next workshop differently.
Much like the previous assignment, coordinating the Peer Mentor program has required me to develop skills in assessment and evaluation. Another activity that I continue to work on that assisted me in developing this competency has been the Mentor Feedback Surveys which serve as an evaluation of the program. These surveys are distributed to upper class mentors, as well as, first-year mentees. Both surveys are different and inquire about the specific needs of each role within the program (i.e. mentors have different learning outcomes to be achieved than mentees). Therefore, I strive to collect different information regarding different aspects of the program from both audiences. In this instance, I have practiced facilitating the appropriate data collection for the college, in order for the department to determine the effectiveness of the program on student retention, GPA, student engagement, and leadership skills development. This data collection is also done via Qualtrics Survey software to ensure accurate analysis and to encourage the use of current technology to do so.This is also a competency that I wish to develop, however I am most confident in my abilities to design various assessment methods and analyze the data. I plan to become exemplary in this competency through presentation of data collection at the institutional level as well as the conference level.