With the end of the quarter right around the quarter, students are in the process of making sure that they are registered for the right classes for next quarter. Planning a student’s college career is not as simple as it may seem, and yet, it is an essential skill to graduate on time. To help students, DePaul has made strides to improve both the experience students have with their advisors and improve online tools.

The results of the efforts by the university can be seen in this year’s advising survey, which revealed a 20 percent increase in student opinion since 2007. In all, 84 percent of the students who responded felt that advising at DePaul adequately met their needs.

Included in the survey were online tools like the planning report that help students map out their college careers on their own. The improvement of students’ perception of academic advising has been helped in part by the improvement of these online tools, according to Caryn Chaden, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs.

“Initially that tool (the online progress report) worked well for students who started their college career at DePaul, but it didn’t work at all for transfer students,” Chaden said. To fix this problem, the university has built a database that can translate transfer credits to their equivalent DePaul credits. “That opens up conversations that before used to be about what you had to do, now its clear what you had to do. Its now all the why questions.”

The success of the efforts to improve the online progress report is apparent in the survey results, because 97 percent of students said that they used the tool, of which 91 percent said they were satisfied with it.

“I just use the degree progress report and what ever fits in is what I take,” Samantha Chan, junior, said. continued to say that she only went to her advisor when she actually had a problem.

“I actually have never used the online progress report,” Kevin Kiengsadaphone, senior, said. “I see my advisor once or twice a quarter to plan for next quarter’s schedule and classes, and now that I am senior, she is helping apply for jobs.”

“All that stuff just behind the scenes creates for a foundation that supports advising,” Chaden said. Moving forward, Chaden wants to continue to improve academic advising by creating new ways to help advisors communicate with their advisors, and find more technological solutions to helping advisors.

One initiative that Chaden is working to implement is a program that would look for signals that a student is having problems and make advisors and students aware of them. She said that flags would include drops in GPA and failing classes that are signs that student is in trouble.

However, many students continue to not visit their advisors. Only two offices for advising had more than 50 percent of students say they used them. Fifty-nine percent of students said that they have been to DePaul Central for advising, and 54 percent of students said they have been to the Office for Academic Advising support. Close behind was college-specific offices, which 48 percent of students said they had been to.

“Getting into the regular habit of going to see their advisor is up to the student,” Chaden said. She continued to say that student should make seeing their advisor a regular habit. “Students might find out opportunities that they wouldn’t know about otherwise.”