September 2023 - Current
System Owner and Operator of Graduating Senior Outreach Process
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Overview
I work as an Academic Peer Advisor within the College of Business. Our responsibility is to support the students of our college through various advising services such as personalized graduation plans, drop-in advising assistance, study abroad support, change of major advising, and more. The main overarching goal of our office is to maintain retention and graduation rates of our college (which are the highest rates in the entire CSU system). After noticing an opportunity to help in our goal of improving our graduation rates arose, I built a process in order to capitalize on it. The finished process is now called the “Purple List” and is now one of the principle tasks performed by our office and will sustain itself even when I am gone.
The Process Framework: Step-by-Step
1. Our office receives an automated list of senior academic-standing students who, according to the online system, has no fulfilled all of their requirements.
2. These names are then imputed on to an excel spreadsheet which I formulated which includes their name, contact information, remaining requirements the student has, and any special notes
3. Peer Advisors are then assigned to go through this list and weed out any seniors that do/will have all their requirements done and to determine which seniors actually do have requirements remaining.
4. Seniors who are determined to have remaining requirements left are then sent an email based on a modular template which I have created. This email alerts the student are their remaining requirements and are advised on what do to in order to get them done.
5. The Peer Advisor then logs their initial next to the person whom which they reached out to on the spreadsheet which both keeps track of who has been alerted and also tallies how many emails each peer advisor has sent.
6. The advisor who tallies the highest on the spreadsheet is then given a reward at the end of the quarter. This reward incentivizes peer advisors to notify the seniors and also gamifies the system which makes it more enticing and engaging for them.
Problem
Before I tackled this issue, the process was extremely lacking, unorganized, and ineffective. In the past, seniors could come into the Peer Advising office in order to have their academic progress checked to confirm they had completed all of their requirements to graduate. This is a reactive form of advising which relies on the student to come into the office to even know in the first place if they could graduate or not. Looking to make the process more proactive and less reliant on the fruition of the student, I built out a process that would proactively alert graduating seniors whether they had requirements left and what those were.
What is the value added?
This process represents a transformative addition to our Academic Peer Advising services within the college, significantly enhancing our ability to support student success and bolster graduation rates. Recognizing a critical gap in our advising process, I developed a proactive and systematic approach to ensure no senior is left uncertain about their graduation status. Unlike the previous, reactive model where students were required to seek out graduation checks, this process reverses the dynamic, alerting seniors in advance of outstanding requirements necessary for graduation. This innovation not only streamlines the advising process but also actively contributes to our overarching goal of maintaining high retention and graduation rates by reducing the reliance on students' initiative to check their status. As a key component of our office's operations, the “Purple List” stands as a testament to our commitment to student success, providing a framework for guiding our seniors to the finish line of their academic journey.
Part of Email Template:
