Continuing Education (for me)

After a nice spring break during which my main contact with students consisted mainly of a few leisurely emails, we are back in full swing. For me, each day has been booked with students and full of adventure. I'm continuing to learn a lot as I go.

I mentioned in a previous post that I enjoy the visits from other departments during our staff meetings. Now that I am in new territory (helping sophomores plan advanced courses and declare majors), let me add new emphasis on just how helpful those meetings have been for me. Last semester, as you know, I worked almost exclusively with first-year students so my baseline in course-planning has been primarily in intro and/or exploratory courses. All of a sudden I have found that I need to know MUCH more in order to help older students, and it gets complicated. For example, there are 2 different biology majors (integrative biology and molecular/cellular biology), and each of those bio majors get tweaked in different ways if the student wants to go to medical school. On top of that, the department has changed a couple of courses such as anatomy/physiology, and there are separate anat/phys courses for IB vs MCB. On top of THAT, different pre-health fields (pre-med, physician assistant, physical therapy, nursing) require different anatomy/phys courses which might vary from the ones required for the actual biology major. Sorry if that's confusing (it is)...I just learned all this in the past week, and that's just for two majors! :)

I honestly love this challenge, and it's making me feel more confident with each student I meet because I'm building my knowledge base every day.

This type of experience also continues to solidify my preference for general advising as opposed to departmental advising. I love that I have the chance to talk about something completely different every half hour.

One surprising thing from this semester so far: I'm surprised by how many students want to take summer courses, mostly at other colleges for transfer credit. Many of them want to do this to get their gen eds "out of the way," a phrase that makes me cringe...those classes are actually really valuable and can enrich the overall college experience! (Remember my article about the courses that everyone should take!). I was surprised because I didn't really know many students who took summer courses when I was in college, and those who did were usually athletes who were on campus anyway. I did just once, and again that was because I was already working on campus and didn't have to otherwise go out of my way to do it. There again though, these were not for transfer, they were on-campus courses. Just an observation. Summer online courses through UIUC also seem very popular.

So this was kind of a hodgepodge of a post, but within the theme of how my experience continues to evolve during this first year on the job. Never a dull moment, and I wouldn't have it any other way!