Orientation and Advising Steering Group

Charge and Membership: Heading link

On the pathway to enrollment, students encounter several critical steps that inform their ability to begin their college experience successfully and which impact their future retention and persistence to graduation. One of the most significant and integral steps to a student’s connection to campus is new student orientation. Likewise, an equally significant and integral step to their academic connection and progression is advising for their first year that leads to the all-important registration process. These steps to enrollment impact yield, melt and retention, and can also pose roadblocks that affect students of various groups differently.

In response to these roadblocks, in October 2023 Provost Colley assembled the Orientation and Advising Steering Group to reimagine the relationships between orientation, academic advising and registration in the pathway to enrollment, with the goal of reaching parity in student success

This group has been be charged with reimagining the relationships between orientation, academic advising and registration in the pathway to enrollment, and to making informed recommendations to leadership for proactive changes that will lead to equitable improvements in enrollment, retention, and graduation, with Fred McCall and Joey Volpe serving as co-chairs.

On the pathway to enrollment, students encounter several critical steps that inform their ability to begin their college experience successfully and which impact their future retention and persistence to graduation. One of the most significant and integral steps to a student’s connection to campus is new student orientation. Likewise, an equally significant and integral step to their academic connection and progression is advising for their first year, and its resultant registration. The steps to enrollment impact yield, melt and retention, and can also pose as roadblocks to those efforts, and affect populations of students differently. Considering this issue from an equity-minded perspective, the committee is asked to review the steps to enrollment and make data-informed recommendations that will result in their optimization. It is expected that the committee will engage in benchmarking peer and aspirational institutions’ best practices for orientation, advising, and registration. Additionally, this committee will be charged with recognizing the dual challenges of delivering a cohesive experience to students and the decentralized responsibilities that contribute to the larger goal of enrolling students.

At UIC, Orientation serves as a holistic transition of first year and transfer students. Providing new students with a cohesive orientation experience ensures an equitable exposure to UIC. Providing students with high quality, and high engagement advising and registration experiences is critical to their academic success. At UIC we have united these very important steps to enrollment through the campus orientation program, and our data has shown us that if and when students attend orientation correlates to their successful retention. Orientation is a collective and commensurate experience at UIC; all students have a uniform experience designed to provide them with an immersive engagement with campus resources, support services, and physical spaces, and to set them up to navigate the campus with confidence.

Advising and registration are unique to the individual student and college and form the academic connection to the university and student’s home college. Despite variation in the delivery model, the goal of first-year and transfer advising is the same. All students should be appropriately advised on their course placements, and requirements, whether in group or one on one sessions, and provided with the guidance and support they need to register.

It is expected that given the collective experience of members, resource-neutral recommendations that are agreed to can be implemented with notification to leadership. Recommendations requiring resources will be advanced to leadership as requests in a summary report. The work of the committee may be done in phases, with Summer 2024 orientation and advising serving as a pilot during which data can be collected so as to inform further recommendations for improvement and resources.

The steering group will oversee the work of subgroups with areas of focus to be determined, but expected to include: student systems and technology, data and analytics, advising and registration, orientation, pre-enrollment communication.

  • Shannon Dwyer, Director Office of Student Systems Services
  • Aisha El-Amin, Executive Associate Vice Provost for Student Success and Belonging
  • Kiely Fletcher, Vice Provost for Enrollment Management
  • Fred McCall, Executive Associate Vice Chancellor and Dean of Students (Replaced by Joy Vergara following departure)
  • Marc Mobley, Director of New Student and Family Programs
  • Tom Moss, Associate Dean for Student Affairs CADA and Chair of CAAD
  • Joy Vergara, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Student Engagement
  • Joey Volpe, Associate Vice Provost for Advising Development