Appendix B | My Site

Appendix B: Data Showing Just How Overwhelmed IUPUI Advisors Are

During our team's initial research we were unable to find exactly how many advisors IUPUI had, and it was difficult to find emails for all advisors. We called the IUPUI advisor office, which was given on the school's website, and they were not sure how many advisors there were throughout the school. Due to not being able to find how many advisors there are for the undergraduate programs, it was difficult for our team to visually see each advisor's workload and their thought process on advising career. However, we were able to find about 36 emails to send out surveys too.

Our team conducted two local studies. One of the local studies consisted of 19 questions and took about 1-3 minutes to take, the study focused on specifically asking the advisors on:

How heavy their workload is
If they have to go through a training to prepare for their job
What concerns and obstacles they have to go through

In order to get the local study out to the advisors, our team had to individually send the survey through email. This process took about a week to complete. As we sent the emails, we received some immediate feedback stating that “priority registration is among us. You may experience a longer delay in email response during this period.” with some extra information on how to schedule an appointment, as well as a statement that said meeting with an advisor was not mandatory and that you can register for classes by yourself if needed. While we received that initial response we never got a response through email from that particular advisor.

Another response that we received stated that they had just returned from a week off and that they were not sure when they would get back into office, as well as it would take them a few days to actually respond because they needed time to catch up on emails and appointments. With acquiring similar responses from other advisors it had appeared that many advisors were becoming overwhelmed with so much work with emails and appointments that they did not have time to take 3 minutes away from their work. So we wanted to incorporate this in our survey to see if this assumption was accurate for all advisors. Though we sent this out to over 36 advisors we only received 8 responses, ranging from the following areas:

S.T.E.M
Academic probation
Exploratory
Social work
Pre-health and life sciences

Below you will find figures 6.6 and 6.7 showing responses from advisors and what they mean.

Figure 6.6: This diagram shows the amount of time our advisors dedicate at IUPUI. The 12% that dedicate less than 10% of their time at IUPUI consist of advisors who are working for academic probation. The other 88% were advisors who dealt with stem majors, pre-health, and exploratory positions. The majority of advisors spend over 75% of their time advising.

Figure 6.7: This diagram shows the amount of students an advisor is assigned. The results showed that 73% of advisors had over 100 students to meet with per year and only 28% had less than 100 students to meet with. The advisors had a chance to put any additional information to add on to the results and it was stated that some advisors have as many as 35 appointments each week and all of them would be full by the end of the week. For some advisors they are only able to give 15minitue increments while others are able to give 30 minute increments.

Our team wanted to be sure that the advisors had a chance to talk about any obstacles that they go through, any comments they wanted to add as well as any thoughts on how to make the job less stressful. The majority of responses are given as follows:

Thoughts on Improvement:

Increase budget to hire more advisors and work on retaining them, to make the ratio between advisors and students smaller.
Get to a more centralized system between all school departments, so that it is easier to communicate with students about their majors.
More remote days to balance work/life to help with advisors' mental health.
Increasing functionality and staff at CAPS.

(Centralized system: means similar workflows, and policies, so that students in multiple majors are able to understand what is required throughout all departments)

Obstacles:

To many students for one person, making it difficult to discuss deeper topics, and build success strategies and plans.
High turnover in advising
Students not knowing about deadlines or not responding to emails
Decentralized system makes it difficult to communicate from advisor to advisor
Not enough time with each student

Covid-19 Impact:

Has led to improvement with flexibility, with the use of online sessions
Online sessions help with being able to work remotely and decrease the feeling of burnout.

Through the process of this local study our team was able to conclude that many advisors feel overwhelmed and are unable to keep up with the advisor student ratio. Many of the advisors wanted it to be noted that they love their students, however they need a lot of help and they have found that many of the students have mental health issues. The advisors want to be there for their students to work out, but simply can’t because of having such a large workload.

Append B