Get advised at the Nest
The NEST (New and Exploratory Students in Transition), formerly First-Year and Undeclared Advising, is one of the busiest departments at KSU. This is a time of year when new students are selecting courses, determining majors, and carefully navigating unexplored territory. Chris Hutt, the NEST director, explains what the NEST is all about.
Q. Can you give me a brief history of the NEST?
A. I’ve only been here two years. The NEST is a new name for an older department: First-Year and Undeclared Advising. It was originally created out of Student Success Services in order to serve those students who came to the university and didn’t have an academic major, so they didn’t have an academic college; they were kind of in this “dead zone” as far as getting academic help. That’s where it came from originally. The idea was to serve those students who were brand new to the
university and hadn’t chosen a major.
More recently, we’ve expanded the definition
of what the NEST is and isn’t and who we serve by including students not just in their first year but
anyone who is undecided or
exploratory or in transition from one
major to another. Of course, with the consolidation and so many new majors coming onboard, there will be a lot of students who have all these new options, and we want to be guides for them.
Q. How does the NEST specifically help first-year students?
A. Students hopefully have a number of advising contacts. If a student has an identified major, he or she will certainly want to work with an advisor in that major since that advisor is the specialist on the academic requirements for that degree. We think of ourselves as generalists, just like in the health care system where you have a bunch of specialists you go to depending on your issue but you also have a primary care physician who hopefully coordinates a lot of that care. We are the primary care physicians for the first-year students who choose to use our office. We help direct them toward the people who can best meet their needs if they cannot be met in the NEST.
by Kelsey Gulledge