IUPUI is a school with a vast amount of opportunities for education, offering 500+ majors to thousands of students every year. To help students with their journey to complete their major, advisors are assigned to students. Trying to have advisors for all these students can lead to some challenges.        

 

Dr.Alves, a lead researcher at Alves Labs at IU School of Medicine observed that the graduate students coming into his lab had struggled during their undergrad years with their schooling and making it to grad school. When he dug further, he found that there was a disconnect between the students and their advisors. This led to students not reaching out when they needed help and advisors not knowing that their students needed help. We decided to dig even deeper to find some other challenges that advisors and students face so we can find ways to eliminate these issues and improve the advising process for both students and advisors. To get some insight from the source, we made surveys to send to the undergrad advisors and undergrad students to get their perspectives on the challenge at hand and any changes they would like to see. Improving the overall academic advising experience will not only help students stay on track to their degree but will also help advisors with their vast workload and allow them to have more one-on-one with students who truly need it.

 

For our research, we collected everything that we did and put it into the methodology section. For our research we went to the internet and used Google and its scholar resources as well as Proquest through the IUPUI library database. We also created two surveys, one being sent out to the undergraduate population here at IUPUI and the other being sent to the undergraduate advisors. These surveys were created to get some insight on how both groups felt about the advising process and to ask some questions that could potentially lead us to future recommendations.

 

From the web-based research and the local surveys, analysis was done to gather our thoughts and information together and be able to form cohesive recommendations later on. These analyses look over multiple online sources as well as bring in data from our surveys to back up the suggestions that we came up with for IUPUI. After this step, recommendations were created for IUPUI to implement to face these challenges of the advising process. The recommendations that our team came up with are as follows: