Graduate Assistant and Intern Team

Project

After I moved from my role in Residence Life to advising, I was struck by the extent to which it can be helpful to already have advising experience if you want to work in academic advising. I was thrilled that PACE Advising already had its Graduate Assistant and Intern Team (GAIT) which was dedicated to hiring, training, mentoring, and evaluating graduate assistants and interns, so that current students could gain that experience. First as a member of the team, and then as part of a shared chairship, I was responsible for making sure that undergraduate interns and graduate student in assistantships gained the skills and experience they needed to succeed. I'm proud to say that several of my former interns and graduate students are currently working in higher education, both at Texas State and at other universities, including Texas A&M and the University of Texas at Austin

Timeline

I joined the team in the fall of 2014. I chaired it in collaboration with a colleague from May 2015 - May 2016. I was part of the team until it ended as a result of changes in budgetary allocations in Spring 2017.

Collaboration

This team consisted of between five and eight academic advisors who shared responsibilities for hiring, training, mentoring, and evaluating interns and graduate assistants in the office. As a chair of the committee, I held primary responsibility for coordinating training, conducting evaluation meetings, and ensuring that students were getting what they needed from their work experience in the advising center.

In addition to our success in training our own graduate assistants and interns, GAIT became a model program and we hosted several concurrent sessions and a pre-conference workshop on how colleagues at other institutions could replicate our success. You can find our web site that detailed the process in much more detail here.

Former PACE Advising Graduate Assistant Rachel Nemets and I are very serious about applying student development theory to concurrent session proposals.

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