L&S Advising is on the Move!

By Associate Dean Bob Jacobsen
January 25, 2007

"Go west, young man": For over a hundred years, that phrase has captured the idea that there are tremendous opportunities when you can move to a new, unsettled space.

In about a year and a half, the L&S Office of Undergraduate Advising will get to test that notion.  Campbell Hall is going to become a construction site, and everybody in it will be moving to other parts of Campus.  The current plan is that Undergraduate Advising will move to a temporary home in Hearst Field Annex, the metal buildings between Hearst Gym, Sproul Hall, Barrows Hall and Bancroft Avenue. Eventually, after other construction projects are complete, we'll move to a more permanent location.

Moving roughly 50 people and their stuff, including phones, computers, and even favorite chairs, is a big job.  Doing it while continuing to provide service to students will require careful planning and lots of  work and patience. Beyond that, though, our goal is to make this more than just an exercise in picking up desks and putting them down somewhere else.  We're taking it as an opportunity to rethink what we do and how we do it.

Over the next few months we'll be examining how to organize ourselves and the new space to best serve students, to best connect with other parts of campus, and to make our office a better place to work. This will range from basic service items like making sure that students can get access to the office without having to wait in uncomfortable lines, to more strategic things such as how we work with advisors in other parts of the campus and what our future programs should best look like.

As this issue of the Advisory goes to press (Bits? Pixels?), we're not yet sure of how we're going to do this over the next few months. We do know that we'll be reaching out to our colleagues across L&S and across the campus as we develop our plans.  Stay tuned, so we can all get a piece of this adventure.