Advisor of the month: June 2025

What do you enjoy about your role in advising?

I enjoy delivering good news! It’s always a pleasure to help my transitional students find a new major or help them chart their course through policies and decisions, to end up in the right field. To colleagues, I enjoy sharing positive data points, especially when they reveal the strengths of particular programs. When we are able to use data to make meaningful changes, and then see improvement, it is particularly fulfilling—this is the primary goal of assessment!

In what ways have you contributed to advising in your department/area?

I run assessment efforts for AAI and lead the Advising Assessment Leadership Group (AALG), which oversees advising assessment at VT. To compliment the decentralized nature of advising at VT, I’ve employed quantitative dashboards to communicate data points and assist colleagues in finding the “data stories” within the statistics. To pivot more to a direct outcomes approach to assessment, I am launching a project to analyze student change of major data for the past three years.

What advice would you give to other professionals who want to make a difference in the life of their students?

I encourage professionals to rely on empirical evidence in making decisions about programs that affect the lives of students. We should trust our impressions and instincts, but also verify that these are accurate by using the appropriate tools of data collection and analysis. Sometimes, the results are surprising and can change how we think about our approaches. Other times, we confirm what we believed, and can then use the data to convince other stakeholders.