Now students with less than 30 credits can be put on the right path to graduation with the help of the new Faculty Advising Program.

Faculty advising is a joint program with the faculty and counselors at SFCC to assist students in finding a major and heading down the path to graduation. If a student is under 30 credits they are assigned a faculty advisor.

The duties of the counselors are to advise the faculty members about the students they are seeing. For example, they will inform them if a student has any special needs or goals.

“We’re doing this to keep students engaged in their college success,” President of SFCC Janet Gullickson said.

The main goal of faculty advising is to get students onto the path of graduation.

“We want students to understand what they need to do to graduate, and the path to graduation,” Gullickson said.

This program was not the first attempt by SFCC to improve the counseling and advising system for the students.

“We have tried a few things over the years to improve advising,”Vice president of SFCC Jim Minkler said. “These efforts have always fallen short of making much of a difference because we kept going back to the same impossible formula, have the counselors do it and those instructional faculty who volunteer.”

Minkler explained that faculty involvement will solve a big problem with the advising system.

“The real problem is that we lacked the involvement of many of our faculty and a definition of what we meant by the word advising,” Minkler said.

Faculty insight is a key part of this new program and a key part in assisting the students.

“We know the requirements, we know what students need to graduate especially if you’re going to transfer versus one person trying to know different areas,” said Janet Barson, a Geology Instructor in the Science Department.

Faculty advising came about because the old counseling system was too small or too limited to benefit the students and so some that needed help were left out.

“In essence, all most students were getting was help with scheduling for classes, not true academic consulting resulting in good student developmental planning,” Minkler said.

“Although SFCC has engaged in such things as arena and cadre advising in the past, the number of faculty who participated was rather small.

“A lot of great advising has oc- curred in many of the career techni- cal programs and some isolated pockets in liberal arts transfer, but many students who could have re- ally benefitted from faculty advising were not able to experience it or had to wait in long lines trying to get in to see a counselor.”