Advising & Support
This competency area highlights the knowledge, skills, and dispositions related to providing support and advising to individuals and groups through direction, feedback, critique, referral, and guidance.
Through developing advising and supporting strategies that take into account self-knowledge and the needs of others, student affairs professionals play critical roles in advancing the holistic wellness of ourselves, our students, and our colleagues.
Career Counseling Former Incarcerated Students Workshop
I greatly appreciated the opportunity given to us in our Career Counseling course to take a more in-depth look into ways in which we as student affairs professionals are better able to advise and support specific student populations through career counseling. My project partner and I chose to research and design a Formerly Incarcerated Students Career Counseling Workshop, in which we incorporate various counseling theories and practical approaches to inform the student affairs professional in their career counseling practice. Research that we had gathered when designing this workshop revealed that formerly incarcerated people experience unique and difficult challenges when attempting to pursue higher education and ultimately prospective career opportunities (Shivy, et al., 2007). Through designing and facilitating this workshop, I was able to greatly inform my own personal approach to career counseling this specific student population. Having a strong background and interest in career services and professional student development, I am continuously seeking guidance and resources that support my ability to advise and support students with unique and diverse backgrounds that add additional challenges to their career trajectory.
New Student Registration Workshop
In an effort to better engage newly enrolled students, I was given the opportunity to present several registration workshops through my position as a Success Guide at Chaffey Community College. These workshops included step-by-step navigation through the course registration process, as well as provided guidance when accessing various resources available to new students. This experience was unique for me in that I have had little opportunity to advise and support students with little to no previous college experience. With the growing attendance of first-generation college students attesting to higher education’s commitment to access and social mobility, the ability of student affairs professionals to combat the inequitable struggles that these students face is still being tested (Eveland, 2020). I found this opportunity as insightful in that my approach to advising these students was altered in order to accommodate and promote accessible and equitable support in accordance with their unique backgrounds.
Mental Health Challenges: Student Veterans, Active Service Member Students & Military Affiliated Students
The final written assignment for our Counseling Issues and Practices course greatly challenged my understanding and approach to navigating the unique and vast mental health challenges that many student veterans, active and reserve service members, members of the National Gaurd, and military-affiliated students bring with them in their college experience. This artifact consists of current research on common mental health challenges associated with students of this population, as well as research on current efforts made by higher education institutions to combat said challenges. In this artifact, I also discuss factors of concern that student affairs professionals and higher education institutions ought to be aware of when serving a rapidly growing population of students that require more engagement effort and accessible services.
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Specifically, one challenge highlighted in this artifact is the struggle to determine consistent and reliable ways of quantifying military-connected student populations on campuses and being unable to easily discern military status (Molina, 2015). My personal interest in this assignment stemmed both from personally identifying as a military-affiliated student as well as having a strong background in cognitive psychology and crisis intervention. This experience further challenged my ability to empathize, advise, support, and serve students of this population by gaining a holistic perspective of mental health concerns these students face. As a student affairs professional, I hope to continue to advance my holistic approach when interacting with students of diverse backgrounds by incorporating counseling theories into my every day practice.