College of Earth, Life, and Health Sciences

Initiative 1: Achieving excellence in undergraduate student advising and program quality.

We are committed to providing undergraduate students with excellent academic advising and professional mentoring in association with degree programs and curriculums rich in experiential learning as keys to student success, satisfaction, and recruitment.  We will strive to deliver an outstanding academic experience while responding to societal demands to meet workforce needs in STEM fields.

We will provide students and faculty advisors with more support at the college level to make our student advising system more efficient and effective. We will refocus faculty advising to allow for a greater emphasis on professional mentoring and career advice to make maximum use of faculty expertise. We will provide faster and more accurate service to students at the college level with common questions on such topics as matriculation and course enrollment, referrals to resources, evaluating degree progress, and other process-related areas. We will develop analytics to improve the budgeting of financial resources in support of high quality academic programs and to focus our efforts to seek additional funding. We will build stronger linkages with employers to better understand workforce needs in support of student and societal success and develop indicators of our improvements and achievements. 

Our success with this initiative will improve customer service for students and provide greater assistance for first-generation and transfer students.  An improved advising system will help new faculty and staff assume full advising responsibilities more quickly, and allow faculty to apply more of their advising effort to professional mentoring and career advising.  We will maintain and improve our college’s record of success in delivering academic programs rich in experiential learning while responding to UMaine’s enrollment needs and public workforce demands for our graduates.

Objectives:

• Elevate undergraduate student advising to a college point of pride by evaluating undergraduate student advising models in the college, UMaine, and nationally; creating an improved advising system for the college and academic units; and developing information and training on best practices for academic advisors.
• Develop a framework for understanding funding and other resource needs to support high quality activity-based learning formats & other experiential learning opportunities (e.g., field trips, laboratory courses, clinical experience, research and capstone activities, active-learning classrooms, internships) as the foundation to improve college and unit stewardship of our undergraduate educations programs. 
• In concert with the initiative on private and public fundraising, increase financial resources to support improvements in academic program quality, including a focus on expanding internship opportunities.
• Ensure our undergraduate programs align with future educational and professional workforce needs of Maine and beyond as the foundation for UMaine and student success.