Reiterate that advising needs to be carefully scheduled and as regimented as possible.

If the advising sessions are taking longer there needs to be a way to make them go faster...perhaps better preparation for the sessions by the students.

Chairs/Directors may continue to support faculty advisors with course releases, newer equipment (if needed), and words of encouragement.

Priority must be given to advising in order to better serve students and to keep them engaged and satisfied. Group advising sessions

We are a small department so have not encountered this as an issue. But, some possibilities would be to host group advising sessions on particular topics. Large departments could host open zoom meetings on advising topics and assist larger groups that way.

Perhaps chairs/advisors could send a pre-meeting survey to students about their plans for the Fall/Spring semesters.

My concern, though, is that the most vulnerable students will be the least able to effectively navigate this process, so we need to find ways to reach out to and support students who have lost jobs, are caring for family members, are trying to juggle full-time at-home kids and school work, etc.

Advising is a huge issue. I'm very concerned there will be a kind of advising crisis in August. Advisors are hugely important in getting/keeping students enrolled and they don't have sufficient knowledge from the top to manage all of the variations to student lives and schedules that are already presenting themselves. Students are also worried or experiencing hardship and are reaching out to advisors at higher levels. The longer things remain uncertain, the more difficult is the balancing act for advisors. Some of the plans and emails that are going out end with telling students to reach out to their advisors, but many advisors are being left to wing it, which is less than ideal. A concerted effort to provide advisors with clearer directives and a list of Covid-specific resources designed for advising would be useful. Advising has been considerably more time consuming since March and hasn't really abated over the summer. I'm concerned there will be a crush in August.

I consulted with our advisors and they noted this is not the experience in anthropology. Advising times have remained the same, or even reduced through virtual sessions. Email advising takes longer and so our advisors are trying to encourage all students to meet by phone or zoom.

We have a full time professional advisor, who does a fantastic job. She really worked hard at being efficient an duding whatever medium students preferred (Zoom, FaceTime, phone, etc). A well organized schedule (with some flexibility) and letting know students the parameters helps everything go better.

This is critical for retention. Chairs need to emphasize the importance of addressing student needs, undergraduate especially, above other responsibilities. Cohort meetings to address common questions with individual follow-ups focused on individual circumstances could support the sense of community for students while allowing reducing repetition in the individual meetings.

Maybe group advising sessions can be used for students who don't have difficult issues to resolve.

The advisors have not told me this. I think they are using a single Zoom link and the waiting room so they can let students in one at a time.

Re-distribute and spread the responsibilities among faculty members in the department.

We just added a second advisor. That should mitigate the workload and help speed up the process.

We have started thinking about what advising materials we have that need to be on our website.