Navigate Feature Spotlight: May 2022
James Newcomer
General Engineering Advising Coordinator, Engineering Education
In what capacity do you use Navigate’s Advanced Search within your college or department?
As the coordinator for the General Engineering Advising Team, I’m responsible not only for my own assigned caseload, but also for monitoring the academic health of the entire population of General Engineering students. At over 2,000 students in a given semester, that’s a lot of data to keep up with! I find it very helpful to search for students by population to track trends; for example, I can search for all GE students with a given “Cohort” tag to see how many students are slightly behind or slightly ahead of the “typical” GE students’ progress. Or I can determine the number of students who are in the “Academic Probation” or “Academic Warning” categories to determine Navigate campaign strategies. Having a quick way to pull up all of this data makes my coordinator job much easier. I can also more easily find information on individual students who are assigned to other GE advisors instead of me when situations are escalated to me.
What is the most useful search or information you have ran and why?
The most useful information I get from the Advanced Search is intersectional data, meaning that I can generate lists of students who fit into multiple subpopulations. I can make several Student Lists based on my own criteria in Navigate, and then I can use Advanced Search to find the students who belong to any two of my lists, or who belong to a given list and also have a GPA below a certain mark. This allows me to target specific subsets of students for proactive interventions more easily, saving me time and allowing me to more holistically address the students’ problems.
What is a reason you would tell others about how you use Advanced Search within Navigate for?
We advisors all know that some students need more help than others, and we need to budget our limited time. Navigate can help us access the data we need to determine who needs a little extra attention. Used properly, the Advanced Search feature puts this data within easy reach.