Preface
The Advising Handbook, Faculty Edition, provides information that faculty advisors need for their work with advisees. All
materials specific to faculty are found in this volume and include more sensitive
faculty issues or amplifications of the text written for students on the same topics
in the New Student Advising and Registration Guide. As always, we look forward to your suggestions for increasing the handbook’s effectiveness.
Please contact us in the Office of Academic Advising to share your thoughts.
There is no one formula for effective academic advising. Each faculty member has an
individual style that he or she brings to the advising relationship. Many of the observations
made in this document come from conversations over the years with faculty about their
experiences. Others come from the Office of Academic Advising staff, who support and
help coordinate the faculty advising program at Skidmore. At its heart, advising is
an extension of teaching and learning, and the strategies you employ as an advisor
resemble those that you use in the classroom: posing questions that lead to discovery;
exploring your advisees' intellectual and career aspirations; helping them to seek
coherence among the curricular choices they make; sharing academic triumphs and achievements;
and listening and responding to your advisees' academic struggles and failures.
Your work as faculty advisors is critical to the success of both the newest members
of the Skidmore community, the Class of 2019, as well as our upper-class students.
The faculty advisor is the first-year student’s primary contact with the Skidmore
academic community, and the relationship formed during Orientation and the first semester
is a very significant one in setting the stage for a student’s successful integration
into our community. Supporting your efforts as faculty advisors is our highest priority.
July 2015
Office of Academic Advising Staff
Kim Marsella, Director of Academic Advising
Alice Buesing, Academic Advisor
Beth McPhee, Academic Advisor
Sandra Jeska, Administrative Assistant