Visitors to the newly renovated David A. Straz, Jr., Hall can hardly miss the glass-encased room on the first floor, just off the main lobby. A student worker sits smiling at a desk, ready to welcome the dozens of future nurses with appointments each day. Couches and chairs dot the spacious interior between advisers’ offices, conference rooms and respite rooms.
“We are very visible,” says Julie Radford, a student success advising specialist. “We’re like the front desk of the college.”
The staff in the Helene Fuld Center for Nursing Student Success provides broad-based support for nursing students, including academic advising, tutoring, student-centered programming and easy referrals to other services at Marquette. If a student has a question and doesn’t know where to go with it, center staff are meant to be the first stop.
Radford has spent more than a decade with Marquette and can predict with precision exactly when students will come to her — freshmen will do it right after the first round of exams; sophomores immediately following the opening pathophysiology test. With 261 first-year students and 245 second-year students, both record highs, Radford has had a full schedule.
“People come to see us when their academic expectations don’t match reality,” Radford says. “Our students are often high achievers in high school, so when they utilize the same study skills and don’t see the same results, that’s usually the impetus for them to come see us.”
One of the main obstacles that advisers must navigate is students’ reluctance to ask for help. Emily Miner, another student success adviser in the college, says some students feel like they’re bothering staff if they schedule an appointment. That is the opposite of how Miner wants students to feel.
“We have an open-door policy, and we want to remind them at every opportunity that we are here for them; there are no silly questions. We don’t want you to wait until you’re panicking to come in,” Miner says.
Students are required to attend advising sessions once per semester, and staff in the Fuld Center handle hundreds of appointments. Radford, Miner and their colleagues each take on a caseload of roughly 200 students, or eight half-hour appointments per day for more than a month. Each appointment requires extensive preparation. Advisers will look up a student’s program plan, grades and notes from any prior meetings to individualize the experience and support each unique learner with holistic, individualized attention.
We are very visible. We’re like the front desk of the college.
Julie Radford, student success advising specialist
There are several things students can do to smooth the process. They should come with an idea about what success looks like for them, even if they’re not entirely sure what classes to take. Students should also arrive on time and prepared to ask questions.
“We believe in relationship-based advising, which entails getting to know our students, asking them how they’re doing and getting a clear picture of what’s going on in their life right now,” Radford says.
When asked if they had any tips for how students could use resources within the center outside of advising times, both Miner and Radford were insistent that students take advantage of tutoring sooner, not later.
“When you get to college, tutoring is a proactive resource,” Radford says. “It’s not like tutoring sometimes is in high school, where you do poorly on an exam and then you sign up for it. Nursing students should be signing up for tutoring from day one so they don’t get into a reactive stance.”
“Concerns about classes are such a common problem; we want students to come to us before they get that test score they didn’t expect,” Miner says.
The students who come through the Fuld Center are in transition: from high school to college, from student to professional and from learner to doer. This naturally comes with challenges: the friction of shedding one life to step into another. The College of Nursing’s advisers are there to help with this transformation and take satisfaction in knowing that they played a part in forming the next generation of nurses.
To book an appointment at the Helene Fuld Center for Student Success, nursing students can email their assigned student success adviser.
