Personal Narrative: My Experience As An Academic Coach

I had the incredibly opportunity to sit in on an academic coaching session with a professional academic coach. When I first entered the Student Success Center, the academic coach invited me into her office to give me some background of the student before the session began. She informed that there would actually be two students involved in the session. One student was actually under the coach’s advisement and the other was just a friend. The academic coach told me that this wasn’t something she would normally do, but she feared that if she didn’t allow her student to bring her friend that she would not come at all. I thought this was a brilliant idea. The coach broke traditional advising strategies in order to follow her duties as an academic coach and provide guidance …show more content…
I don’t either!” and everyone in the room laughed. She also specifically stressed that the advice she was giving them were purely suggestions, reassuring the students that the academic coach wasn’t to be seen as a superior but as an equal. These interactions made the students feel much more comfortable and open with their academic coach. After about 45 minutes, the academic coach decided to wrap up the appointment and explained that after the initial corrections were made to their resumes, they could come back in and make a final copy. This allows the students to fulfill the deliver step of appreciative advising and give them the opportunity to follow through in revising their resumes. The students became so comfortable with their coach that they began asking unrelated questions like how to order books for next semester and were able to learn valuable information about how to buy books, rent books and save money by selling them back. At the end of the session, the students were pleased and excited about everything they