Q. What is the most common question students ask – or information they are seeking – when they come to the NEST?
A. Students will come in just needing help with “what classes do I take next semester?" but that question is kind of the doorway that allows our advisors to ask them lots of questions about other needs they might have that they aren’t even aware of yet. The most common question is “What do I need right now?” or “What do I need for next semester?” but these questions open the door to helping the students in a lot of different ways.
Q. About how many first-year, soph- more, junior, and senior students come in typically?
Q. Are there any specific students or student populations that the NEST has helped?
A. At the NEST, we see a lot of good students who are having a hard time getting into some of the university’s gated programs. In these cases, we help students find similar programs that allow them to get somewhere that maybe they haven’t considered previously.
Q. How will advising be different this year (summer)?
A. We have to meet the challenge of offering advising in two physical places and serving what we think will be two distinct student populations.
Q. What are some major milestones the NEST has achieved in your two years as the director?
A. One of the things the NEST has been responsible for is creating an advising network that has hopefully opened lines of communication between advisors across the colleges, so we’re sharing more information than perhaps we did before. I believe that the NEST has become the information hub not only for students but advisors as well. Of course, another major milestone in January was our move from Student Success Services to University College.
Q. What have been some of the changes from making that move in January?
A. We are now solidly rooted in an academic college in the same way that all the other advising centers are at KSU. Hopefully this gives us a seat at the table and parity with the advising centers in the other colleges. Now that we are in University College, I believe we will be more visible at Orientation. Of course, prior to joining University College, we were in Student Success with Orientation and partnered with them there. However, our move to UC brings together orientation, advising, and the first-year seminars of First-Year and Transition Studies together under one roof, all of which play a large role in students’ first-year experience. Having all three of these in one college will hopefully create a more integrated experience for our students.
Q. What advice do you have for first-year students who will be starting fall 2015?
A. I would tell them that it’s very important to find someone on campus - whether it’s an advisor, a professor, a mentor, or a student organization leader - who is invested in their success and who can advocate for them.
A. Primarily, we see first-year students. I do not have an exact breakdown, but I’d say about 70-75% of the students we serve are in their first year. Our whole idea of the NEST metaphor is to have students feel like this is a good place to start. Hopefully we are creating a nurturing, welcoming, and helpful environment, but ultimately,
we want the students to leave the NEST to
find their academic home and academic college.