Editor's note: Professor Ernst Schoen-Rene received the 2001 Outstanding Advisor Award from the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA). His personal statement for the award nomination speaks eloquently of the relation between advising and teaching.
When I was about ten, my father, who was also a college professor, explained to me what it meant to be a teacher. A teacher, he said, is a professional, like a doctor or a priest, whose job is to know, to serve, and to be on call for help at all times. My father's situation made this an achievable goal. Professors at his small liberal arts college taught no more than three classes, and those classes were generally small. In addition, he – we – lived on the edge of campus, so that seminars met in the living room or on the porch, and students dropped by at all hours – even at dinner time, when my father would ask them to bring a chair from the living room and join in the conversation.
I never consciously strove to imitate my father, but now that I look back on these things from a relatively advanced age, I can see that, despite the fact that I live in a radically different world, the values he professed remain stamped on my soul. As a teacher, I have tried to make myself wholly accessible to my students on campus most of the day; I let them call me at home; I make sure each of my classes meets at my house at least once during the semester.
When I became an adviser, I continued this sort of thing. I posted official advising hours of between one or two hours a day, but, again, I would deal with people – including the large numbers who call in for help from off campus – whenever they could get hold of me. I let them call me at home; indeed, I would often call them from home, having brought a list of calls to be answered and people to be spoken to back home from work. This was good to do, especially because the people I was advising often worked or taught during the day, and could only be called in the evening.
The down side, of course, is that the number of people I deal with, the variety of places they come from, and the teaching load that accompanies my advising have probably trebled since my father was doing similar things forty and fifty years ago. It is now damned hard work, but I have kept at it because something deep inside me tells me that this is the right and professional way to behave.
This killingly hard work aside, I have enjoyed it. I find it personally enriching to deal with, look into the lives of, and learn about the varied undergraduates, graduates, and outsiders I find myself in the position of helping. I have also enjoyed the challenge of streamlining and making as user-friendly as possible the many programs and processes the people I advise become involved in. I have enjoyed the challenge of doing little things well – such as calling students the very evening after they have undergone a test or an interview and giving them the results.
But perhaps the greatest joy of being an adviser is the sense one has of a certain kind of freedom in a world beset by constricting rules and regulations. If a student's schedule will not allow him or her to take a required class, I can put forth viable options based on my sense of that student's character and needs. If someone from outside the university comes to me for subject-matter competency, I can decide whether that student is literate or needs to have something done about his or her writing. Or I can talk to that person, learn about his or her strengths and experiences, and formulate a program that provides what he or she needs in order to become a knowledgeable, confident teacher and, at the same time, eliminates hoops through which it would do him or her no good to jump. In this, there is a kind of creative freedom, mixed with a careful tailoring to suit an individual's needs, mixed with a sense of having a hand in preparing the best possible candidates to go into the profession I love and believe in. This makes my work totally worth while and satisfying.