Daniel Nester's Teaching Blog

Hello, Daniel Nester Advisee!

This post explains what you need to do before your advising appointment on Advising Day, March 19, 2013, as well as outline how to set up an appointment with me. If you are a continuing advisee, you probably know the drill; if you are a new advisee, I urge you read all of these directions, and email me with any questions before we meet.

The goal of this 15- to 20-minute meeting is for me to advise you on which classes you should take, to approve your tentative schedule, and give you a PIN number so you can register for classes.We have a short time to accomplish this.This means student advisees need to do some work before we meet.

Advisement meetings will take place in my office Dolan Hall, 442 Western Avenue, 1st floor, Room #1 first on the right. My office phone number is 518-454-2812; my email is nesterd at strose dot edu.

Preparing for Your Advising Appointment

1. Email me to sign up for a meeting. The online sign-up sheet with appointment times is at the bottom of this post. Check this page and refresh it often. Advisement times are on a first-emailed, first served basis. There are as many appointment times as there are advisees, and then some.

2. Obtain and fill out a Course Registration Form. This is important. Barbara Dickson in the English Department has copies, as well as the Registrar in Saint Joseph Hall’s Student Solution Center. Here is a link to a PDF file. Please do not come to our advisement appointment without filling out the top matter of this form (i.e., your name and address) and courses you need to take.If we change your choices through the course of our meeting, we can simply cross one course out and add another.

Bottom line: bring the form and fill it out beforehand. If you do not come to our appointment without a filled-out form, I will have to reschedule our appointment. If you show up without a form or with simply a blank form, there’s no point in meeting, since a large part of our meeting will consist of me looking at you writing out your address.

3. Login to Banner (bannerweb.strose.edu) and review your Academic Progress report. Print the report out or download it for your files. Look at it and see if all of your classes are falling into the right places. Identify which areas in your English major requirements as well as your Liberal Education requirements you still need to fulfill.

3a. If you are a transfer student, looking at your Academic Progress Report is doubly important. Make sure that your transfer classes are there, that nothing looks strange or out of place, that your transferred classes are also “counting” for requirements you think they should be. For example, make sure that a class you thought fulfilled a requirement is not languishing in your General Electives on the bottom-right-hand corner of your report. You should also have a copy of your Statement of Transfer Credit report, which tallies up which classes you took at your previous institution, and tells you where it will apply in the College of Saint Rose degree requirement. If you transferred from some of the local colleges, the college keeps a Transfer Equivalency Database online.  This information is designed to help provide you with an unofficial evaluation of the courses and how they may transfer to the College. It’s helpful to see if any of your courses should have gone somewhere else on your degree requirements. Please come with these questions at our meeting, and we can figure out the next step.

Those of you who have already met me for an advising appointment know that I take ample notes in your student folder regarding what administrative tasks need to be done to make sure classes are falling in the right places in the Academic Progress Report, there are no clerical errors, etc.

4. Review the semester’s English Department Course Offerings and read the course descriptions. College-wide courses are at strose.edu/ugcourses. Look at your Academic Progress report and identify which kind of English courses you need to take. This is your major; read the courses descriptions and come with questions about particular courses.Figure out your schedule as far as days of the week are concerned.And finally: Have an idea of which English course(s) you would like to take next semester (as well as Summer, if applicable). Continue reading →