I began this site over two years ago while hunting for library jobs after graduating with my MLIS.  A lot has changed in my career since then, and now, what began as my “library and information science professional e-portfolio” has morphed into an online personal website highlighting my career, accomplishments, and activities.

Today, I thought attending an academic advising conference as an invited “best of state” presenter representing Wisconsin was as good as any occasion to begin blogging on this site too.  In the future, I hope to post about my professional activities, news related to higher ed, academic advising, and of course, the field of information science.

Advising: It’s a zoo out there!

Invited Presenters:

As I mentioned above, I am attending the NACADA Region 5 Conference this week in Kalamazoo, MI.  My advising colleagues in the UWM School of Information Studies and I were invited to attend and present #DigitalAdvising @YourSchool! again, as we had received the award of “Best of State” at Wisconsin’s WACADA conference last fall.

This is the fourth time we’ve presented on this topic, and each time we tweak it a little, make improvements, and learn a lot from the experience   Sometimes we get the same questions from the audience, and other times  they blow us away with questions about issues we’ve never thought about before.  It is very enlightening to think about what you do in your own office, and see how it might or might not translate to other units, universities  and populations.

We ran out of time at the end again, which was as disappointing as always.  We had even scheduled it as a pre-conference and had two full hours.  We got hung up on the questions about twitter again, which is the same thing that always happens.  On our comment cards we got a few suggestions such as “take questions at the end instead of throughout” and “have a beginners and a separate advanced version” and “don’t spend so much time convincing us to buy into the idea, we’re already here aren’t we?”

We took these and other comments to heart and have decided to totally revamp our format before presenting again at an international conference in the Netherlands in June this summer, and again as featured presenters at the Sloan-C Blended conference in July. We’re hoping it will fix our time-management/taking questions from the audience problems, so stay tuned to see how it goes!

Conference Summary:

Kalamazoo has been lovely.  I used to attend International Medieval Congresses here back in my history days and it’s just as welcoming as I remember.  The locals are genuinely nice people, the food has been surprisingly impressive, and the conference activities have been fantastic!  Our welcoming reception was at the Kalamazoo Air Zoo, which is a cross between an aircraft museum and an indoor amusement park.  They had good food & a cash bar with Bell’s brewery items…. a little teaser for the next night (we took a brewery tour the second night and good times were had by all!).

In regards to professional development and networking (the real reason we’re here) – this conference has been a pleasant surprise.  Often I find as a graduate advisor attending these events many of the programs are geared toward first-year experience and other undergraduate advising issues.  However, there have been so many offerings during each session at this conference that I’ve been having to make some tough decisions about which ones to attend!

I missed a pre-con on research in academic advising because it was concurrent with our pre-conference workshop, but I was able to connect with one of the speakers via Twitter and ask for the handouts so I’m excited to dig into that later 🙂

I attended a couple of tech sessions, one of which, on social media specifically, was FANTASTIC!  I was able to clarify a lot of my questions about writing for and publishing with NACADA, and have been meeting some great advisors from my region!  The twitter backchannel has been phenomenal, the best by far, that I have ever seen at a small-medium size conference like this before.

The Region 5 conference will take place in Madison, WI next year!  I’m sure there will be plenty of calls for volunteers soon and with the hosting location being so close to home, I have to assume that lots of my peers at UWM and perhaps even SOIS will get involved.  The theme is Mooooooving Advising forward, so that will be an interesting one to play on…. oh Wisconsin 😉