Faculty in the Department of Psychology are dedicated to providing high quality educational experiences to undergraduate students. Meeting this goal, however, goes beyond what is presented in the classroom. To get to the classroom, students must navigate course sequences, prerequisites, and specializations. Our department recognizes that providing assistance to students navigating their education is essential to student success. To this end, Dr. Jessica Caporaso has led an initiative to provide effective and accessible advising to undergraduates as the Head of Undergraduate Advising within the department. Here, Dr. Caporaso details how she has reimagined advising in the department and the impacts it has made on our students.
What led you to implement changes to psychology advising?
Prior to Fall 2022, a team of lecturers and graduate students operated a standard appointment-based advising model. As the major continued to grow, and lecturer demands increased, it became evident that the department needed a new advising model. During Summer 2022, Gaby Stein and Emily Carrigan devised what is now the backbone of the current PsyAdvise model: a tiered support approach where students can access advising through a self-guided Canvas page (least support), a centralized email address, and drop-in advising (most support). Since its implementation in Fall 2022, I have worked to build upon their work to make the PsyAdvise system as efficient, informative, and student-friendly as possible.
Why are these changes important to consider?
Student needs and program curricula are ever-evolving. It is important to have a faculty member whose primary purpose is student advising to facilitate swift communication about curricula changes, quickly address student needs, and ensure that messaging and knowledge are consistent across all students in the majors. Prior to the change to our more centralized system, students would often report not hearing back from their advisor in a timely manner, receiving conflicting information, or general confusion about advising and their degree requirements. Anecdotally, these types of complaints have decreased among the psychology majors.
What are some of the largest changes that you’ve made?
I have implemented daily drop-in hours that were solely designed to meet with students one-on-one to address their individual questions, assigned my team specific days to check emails and provided them with templates for responses to common questions, and built out the course list submission to a full self-guided degree audit “quiz” that students must complete every semester to get their advising codes. Borrowing from a similar model in the Communications department, I also started a peer advising program, which is essentially tutoring for course registration and degree planning.
Within the last year, I have dedicated time to building out the career resources we provide students. This includes implementing optional, individualized, degree-planning meetings for pre-health profession students (e.g., pre-medical, pre-dental), hosting major-wide “office hours” for career advising twice a week, and creating dedicated pages on our Canvas course with many informational links for internships, graduate school, and general career resources.
I have also redesigned the PSY 122 Careers in Psychology class as a complement to the advising system. Prior to this, the course was 1 credit and solely featured speakers from various psychology careers. The new 3-credit version of the course continues to feature career speakers, but strives to connect these careers with concrete steps towards each career during college. For example, students are provided with psychology course, experience learning, and minor suggestions that help prepare students for various popular careers. The course also covers the psychology of academic success, provides an overview of advising and degree requirements, and has students create graded degree plans.
What immediate impacts have you seen resulting from your changes?
Two of the largest issues I noticed before implementing changes were 1) the number of continuing students that registered the week before and during the first week of the semester and 2) the number of students who could not graduate on their intended target date because they did not know all of their degree requirements. Both of these issues have drastically decreased. On average, we are able to provide 550 students with advising codes in 1.5 months during the actual semester, suggesting that students are registering for classes sooner rather than later. Students also are more likely to mention the minimum credit requirements (120 overall, 36 at the 300+ level) during advising meetings and on their course lists each semester.
Looking at the data, the average amount of time it took 2024-2025 graduating psychology majors to finish their degree decreased by 10% compared to 2019-2020. While many factors could contribute to this decrease, the knowledge and agency our advising model instills in students has likely made an impact.
How have you helped other departments revise their advising systems?
I am very open to providing advising consultation to other departments. If it works for us, I see no reason that other departments shouldn’t be able to benefit from similar systems! So far, I have met with advisors in both the Biology and Media Studies departments and have given both departments access to our Canvas site so they could pull whatever resources are needed for their departments. Biology’s new advising system, BioAdvise, was modeled after PsyAdvise, which I believe speaks to the success of the model in very large departments.
Seeing the success of PsyAdvise – Here are some student comments speaking to the success of the changes to the Department of Psychology’s academic advising system:
“I think one of PsyAdvise’s best attributes is how flexible it is; I’ve studied abroad twice and PsyAdvise members helped me arrange things such that I’m graduating on time! This flexibility also has allowed me to explore my academic interests to the best of my ability—I’ve been able to work in so many classes that have piqued my interest with the help of PsyAdvise—there is a full understanding that your Psychology degree is here to serve you, and that you get to mold the experience to exactly what you want it to be PsyAdvise is also great because of its diverse makeup of members who can give advice on a wide array of issues that psychology students deal with. I like that there are people on staff who were transfer students, are considered “non-traditional students,” are on pre-professional tracks, and/or are disciplinary honors students, for example, whose different experiences enable them to provide the best advising possible for psych undergraduates.” – Zion Raczenski, Senior Student
“After switching my major to psychology, I was surprised I no longer had to wait to meet with my advisor to ask questions regarding my graduation plan. The drop-in sessions are especially helpful when I need to ask a quick question or have my class choices looked over by someone trained in course planning and requirements. “- Safa Choudry, Senior Student
“PsyAdvise is organized in a way that empowers students to take onus of their academic journey but does so with supportive scaffolding. Advising offices at other universities are often mystified and can feel impossible to understand without time-intensive effort. PsyAdvise, however, is simple to follow. Resources for academic advising, career resources, and more are readily made available, and there are many opportunities to interact directly with advising staff. The responsibility remains on students to access resources and care about the decisions being made; however, there are clear guardrails in place to direct us. The program operates with the best interests of the students at its heart and helps to prevent anyone falling through the cracks.” – Ashley Leonard, Senior Transfer Student
