It’s easy these days to get overwhelmed by the continuous stream of information that comes at you through social media, and e-mail. A while back, I discovered a great tool to help cut through some of the noise. It’s called Gist, and it brings your contacts into one place to give you a full view of your network, making it easy to find anyone, anytime. You see email addresses, phone numbers, work details and more, all assembled and updated automatically. You can also directly ask your contacts to provide their latest information by requesting a profile update.
I’ve been using it to help kind of take the pulse of my inbox and social network each morning, so I can prioritize my follow-up. It’s also great for getting some background on people you are meeting with each day. And it can be used in GMail (including hosted Google Apps Mail), Outlook and Lotus Notes, and works on your iPhone or Android phone.
Check it out and you’ll probably agree that Gist helps you stay organized while monitoring your mail, your calendar, and your network.
Last Monday, I posted over on higheredlifecoach.com about how successful students seek help. I suggested that students familiarize themselves with resources available to them on campus early so that they know where the appropriate offices are if they need them in the future. When I was working out some of the details about my post with Sean, he suggested that I might also give some ideas to higher ed staff and administrators about how we can help encourage help-seeking behaviors in our students.
I don’t claim to be an expert on this subject, and I really would just like to start the discussion about setting the tone to encourage students (and perhaps even other faculty or staff) to ask for assistance when needed.
I started my job as an academic advisor at a new institution two years ago. When I was interviewed, I remember being asked how comfortable I was asking questions of others. As with most jobs or new institutions, there was a huge learning curve to overcome before I really felt confident meeting and talking about academic-related issues with students. I didn’t know where buildings are (I still have to refer to the campus map pretty frequently), I didn’t know the specifics of the curriculum, and I didn’t know what additional resources were available to our students. My office trained me on the curriculum throughout my first few months on the job, but much of the training about additional resources was left to me. I looked at every web site on our university’s “For Students” page. I attended brown-bag lunch presentations by a variety of people from across campus. Some of my colleagues and I set up appointments with various offices to get more information about the services they provided. It was a long (and ongoing) process to gather information that I knew my students needed, but that I didn’t necessarily have.
I am a full-time employee and I don’t have all of the information. I spend 40+ hours per week helping students, and yet I don’t have anywhere near all the answers. So how or why do we expect our students to know where they should be finding appropriate resources? At this point in my life, I have at least become comfortable with asking for help or for the answer to a question if I don’t know, but some of our students haven’t gotten there yet. For some, this is the first time that they may have encountered difficulty, either with their academics, personal life, or emotions. If they haven’t had to ask for help before, it can be a challenging thing to do, especially because first it means that they have to admit they don’t have it quite all together.
Our campuses need to set the tone that it is okay, and actually encouraged, to ask for help. Perhaps that means launching a campus-wide “Just Ask!” campaign, with posters highlighting campus resources, YouTube videos with plugs from the university president or high-profile student athletes, and a Twitter account to accept and respond to questions. A campaign of that size likely would take a lot of coordinating, but it could be really effective in the long-run. If you are looking for ways of encouraging help-seeking behaviors in the shorter term, here are some of my ideas:
Encourage students to find at least one person (faculty, staff, administration) on campus who they feel comfortable talking to, even about difficult issues. That one person might not be able to answer all of the student’s questions or solve all of his/her problems, but would at least be likely to be able to provide referrals to others who can continue to help.
Find out what resources are available to students on your campus. If possible, know the office hours and location, and perhaps even the name of someone in that office.
Keep pamphlets or fliers of available resources easily accessible to students. If there isn’t space in the office or on your desk, at least have them handy so that you could give one to a student if necessary.
If you don’t know the answer or the appropriate office to refer to, ask someone else. If students see that even faculty and staff are willing to ask others, they may gain some courage to do the same in the future.
What have others done to encourage help-seeking on your campus? Please share your ideas or programs!
As Stacy Oliver pointed out in her blog post last week on the Student Affairs Collaborative Blog, we are often afraid of asking for help because there might not be someone there to help. We all know that we work in higher education to support students and that if a student asks for help, we will be there. Now we just need to figure out how to make sure that the students all know that!
Sarah Howard is in her third year of academic advising at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She advises students with majors in natural sciences, mathematics, and pre-health fields. Sarah completed her bachelor’s degree at Ashland University in Ohio with a double major in English and mathematics and a religious studies minor; she also holds a Master of Arts degree from Bowling Green State University in college student personnel. Her favorite colors are blue and orange. She can be found online at @howardsj or her blog at http://undecidedlyadvising.blogspot.com
The last few weeks have been interesting to me. With the exception of August 1999, when I was in-between jobs, I worked on college campuses during the busy back-to-school rush for all of my adult life. So it was weird to not be getting ready for new staff, RA training, and welcome week.
I expected this August to be different, in terms of how busy I would be, but that hasn’t been true. I’ve had a lot of client appointments lately, as some finally found themselves full-swing back into searches that had stalled for a while, and realizations that the grad school applications they’d been thinking about in theory need to find their way to paper (or electronic) form sooner than later. All the sudden, following up on a site redesign, some emerging partnerships, the development of some e-books, seminars and workshops moved from my “get to that soon” list to “Oh, crap, I really have to get in gear with that” list. And I realize that I wasn’t paying attention.
It reminded me a lot of my time on campus, and all that goes into getting ready for a successful year. I wonder now why I expected it to be different. There are so many things that pull at our attention and all too often, we drop the ball, and miss the important details of what is going on around us. Today, I was catching up on Twitter (something that often distracts me, but that oddly, during this time, I have been able to tune out) and I saw this tweet from my friend and coaching buddy Monica Moody.
The link she mentions in her tweet goes to a YouTube video of an interesting psychology experiment about attention. And a reminder that, as Linda Loman pleads in her famous monologue to son Biff in Death of a Salesman, “attention must be paid.” (Video embedded below.)
As you get into full swing of the back-to-college season, and all the stresses that come with it, how are you paying attention? What will you be missing? And how can you keep yourself from missing the “invisible gorilla?”
Please share your thoughts in the comment section.
Mike Davenport (a/k/a LeadershipGeek) regularly contributes his “custom thought illustrations” to the discussions over at Third Tribe Marketing (aff. link), where the sketches for this guest post originally appeared. He is also slugging away at his own website, Not the Slightest Idea. You can see more of his stuff on SmugMug.
As the academic year begins this August, approximately 2 million new students will flood campuses in the United States (according to the National Center for Education Statistics), representing about 68% of the nation’s recent high school graduates.
When you work in higher ed, you spend the summer getting ready for this great mass of humanity, their parents, and all their stuff. Each year, the next most-connected generation in history descends upon campus, ready for the mythical wonderland called college…full of challenging classes, enlightened professors, new friends, great parties, and steeped in fine traditions, pomp, circumstance, and loads of fun. The newest, most exciting “best days of their lives.” And they come with almost romanticized visions of college, so we spend our time and efforts on being ready, smoothing out the edges, and making that move-in and arrival period as painless as possible. We concentrate next on getting our student staff trained (whether they’re resident assistants and orientation leaders in brightly colored move-in shirts, or dining hall crew members, desk staff, or teaching assistants, etc.)
It’s easy during busy times like this to forget how important it is to make sure our new professional staff members make the adjustment to campus successfully, as well. We hope for it, and plan for it, but sometimes drop the ball in our planning, because of all the other priorities we’re juggling. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 124,600 postsecondary administrators in the country in 2008.Of course, most of these are not new staff. As experienced professionals, they know the drill, have the routine down pat, and motor along the path of same-old, same-old. Sometimes, right over the new staff, who are still looking for the bathrooms in the building, don’t know the code to the copier, and haven’t received a computer password, not to mention a paycheck yet. It can be a rough adjustment for these new staff, and retention of good staff is always an issue. Sometimes, we burn them out with training and teambuilding before the first student moves in, or the first class bell rings.
This month, we’ll spend some time on the topic of transitions, and to invite some guest bloggers to contribute their thoughts on how we prepare our new staff.
Some possible formats include:
Philosophical pieces (like “how to think about your job,” “what you need to think about,” and “what you need to understand about our organization, field, specialty, etc.”)
Practical Pieces: (give an example of a favorite training activity, a checklist for getting started in a new position, or steps toward creating a positive routine, etc.
Creative pieces (art, video, publications, poetry, readings, etc. What do you share and why do you share it?)
Some combination of the above
If you are interested, please contact me at sean@higheredcareercoach.com and let me know which of the following opportunities interests you, and join the conversation.Guest posters will also be invited to appear on the Higher Ed Life and Careers podcast on BlogTalkRadio.
Monday Morning Quarterback: Guest posts in this category will be “thought” pieces, leaning toward the idea of having a “gameplan” for your training and transition efforts. So I would love to have some philosophical or creative pieces here, but don’t be afraid to be practical.
Tuesday Time-Out: Like the title says, I’d like these to be brief, welcome breaks from the action. This would be a good place to share your ideas on how to welcome staff to the team, build rapport, inspire, and support them through the busy transitional period. This could also be a great place to share your favorite training activities, including icebreakers, teambuilders, or even outlines for your expectation-setting activities and first meetings with new employees.
So, whether you are a higher ed professional, or from some other category entirely, you’re invited to share your thoughts as a guest blogger. Please e-mail me at sean@higheredcareercoach.com this week if you are interested, and check back next week for our first guest column.
Work with Sean. I help higher ed professionals take control of their careers with tailored services including resume and CV development, LinkedIn profile optimization and networking strategy, interview coaching, and one-on-one career guidance.
