Assortment of items

This week's events have made my transition to full-time DGS status solid. The week was jam-packed, and each event helped connect me to campus in a way that I had not yet experienced.

On Tuesday, I attended my first IlliAAC meeting. IlliAAC is the academic advisors' association of UIUC. Before now, I have heard many names of other advisors outside of DGS, particularly departmental advisors, and I have even spoken with some of them on the phone. But this meeting gave me my first opportunity to put some faces with those names. The Career Center presented at the meeting as well, which was very helpful because it gave advisors and career counselors a chance to talk about how they can help each other when providing major/career guidance to students.

Yesterday, the advisors of DGS and LAS met all morning to discuss topics relating to major transfer processes in LAS (in other words, issues that come up when students start to declare LAS majors from DGS). This was a great conversation because a lot of issues came up that revealed previous frustrations and miscommunications and got both LAS and DGS advisors on the same page. Hopefully, as we discussed in the meeting, that conversation will help us to work together more effectively and reduce the number of times that students are sent back and forth between different advisors on campus.

Also this week, I helped with the second annual calling campaign, in which a few of us called students who have been admitted to DGS for Fall 2011 as James Scholars. I participated 2 of the 3 nights. Basically we called to ask if students had any questions about DGS to help them as they make their decision about which college to attend. I mostly reached answering machines, but I did talk to a few students and a couple of parents, who thought it was nice that we called :) (I guess not everyone thought it was nice though - another advisor got someone who was very put off that he would call...can't win 'em all).

In between all this were the usual student appointments, so it has been a very busy and successful week!