Move-in day still undoes me a little, even after this many years. I stood at campus intersection this week watching the scene I’ve watched many times: parents hauling bins up stairwells, a first-year kid trying to look calm, an orientation leader with a lanyard and a smile that has to last twelve hours straight.
I remember being that overwhelmed practitioner. My first years coaching, I’d spend a short session with a new student, say the one thing I most needed them to hear, and then the next kid was already in the doorway. No follow-up. No way to know if anything landed. Just the next name on the list, and the next, until the day ended and I couldn’t have told you which sentence, if any, had stuck.
There are two kinds of support in this work, and most of what gets written about advising and coaching is really about the first kind. A caseload you see every week. A coaching relationship with months ahead of it. You can say the wrong thing on a Tuesday and fix it on Thursday, because Thursday is coming.
Other times, the first two weeks particularly, is mostly the other kind. A student shows up once, unscheduled, sometimes already lost, sometimes right at the edge of a decision that’s hard to undo, and you don’t know if you’ll see them again. There’s no Thursday. Whatever gets said has to do the whole job by itself.
None of this happens in a vacuum anymore, either. Most institutions now run some version of an early-alert system, software that watches enrollment data and flags a missed prerequisite, a dip in the learning management system, a form nobody submitted. Some advisors walk into a session with an AI-generated summary already open, everything the system knows about a student on one screen. All of that genuinely helps. None of it changes what happens once the door closes. The technology can tell you who needs to hear something. It still has to be a person who says it.
I talked with a few colleagues living inside that second kind of student encounter. What each of them is trying to say in one sitting is different, depending on who’s in front of them. I asked what they’ve landed on [names have been replaced for privacy].
Priya advises transfer students, and the meetings that stay with her aren’t the ones on her calendar. They’re the ones where a student finally sits down across from an advisor for the first time in over a year, and the news isn’t good.
She told me about a student I’ll call Alina, a community college transfer. Alina’s course credit had come in fine on paper, but as an elective, not the specific prerequisite her engineering sequence actually needed. Nobody caught it. She kept registering herself online, building a perfectly reasonable schedule around a course she didn’t actually have.
It surfaced at her degree audit, a year in. The retention software flagged it correctly, right on schedule. What it couldn’t do was decide what Alina should do next, or be the one in the room when the numbers landed. The course she needed only runs once a year, and she’d already missed it. Whatever she took next, she was already going to graduate late.
That’s when she finally sat down with Priya, for the first real conversation either of them had ever had.
“You already know how to be a college student,” Priya told her. “You’re still learning how to be a college student here. It’s not your fault nobody said so out loud, but you’ll get there.”
Naming the pattern wasn’t going to buy back a semester, so the conversation had a second half. “A found year isn’t the same as a lost year,” Priya told her. “Everybody panics about the delay and nobody asks what else fits into it now. An internship. A minor you’d been curious about. A semester abroad, if the numbers work. You didn’t choose this timeline. You still get to choose what goes in it.”
Priya doesn’t know yet what Alina will do with the year. That part, like most of it, she may never find out.
Jalen is twenty, an orientation leader, a junior who spent this week wheeling luggage carts and answering the same three questions a few hundred times. Where’s the dining hall. How does the wifi actually work. Is my roommate normal. But there’s a fourth question underneath the other three this year, and it never comes up as a scheduled talk. Someone jokes about having ChatGPT write their essay. Someone asks, half-serious, whether professors can actually tell. Someone wants to know if everybody’s basically doing it anyway.
“I don’t lecture them,” he said. “I tell them what happened to me.” He’d used a tool to help write a discussion post he didn’t feel like doing, turned it in, felt fine about it for about a week, and then got cold-called on it in the next class and had nothing. “I remember standing there with actually nothing to say, about a post that had my name on it. That’s the story I give them, not a rule.”
He’s noticed the ones who laugh a little too hard at the story are usually the ones who needed it. He can’t follow up with any of them individually; there are hundreds, and by October he won’t remember most of their names. So he stopped worrying about reaching everyone and started worrying about telling the story well to whoever happened to be standing there. “If it’s a good enough story, they tell it to their roommate later. I don’t have to be in the room for that part.”
Teresa runs a single ninety-minute workshop for an early-arrival bridge program, mostly first-generation students, one session, no repeat. She used to fill the time with strategy: how to read a syllabus, how office hours actually work, the mechanics of being a successful student. All useful, she said, and almost none of it landed, because the students in the room weren’t stuck on mechanics yet. They were stuck on whether they belonged in the room at all.
So she opens differently now. She tells them, plainly, that feeling lost this week isn’t proof they made a mistake coming here. “I actually took the line straight from the book,” she said. “The struggle is not a sign that you don’t belong. It’s the normal feeling of building something hard and worthwhile. I say it exactly like that. Rewriting it would have made it worse.”
She closes with one plain instruction that has nothing to do with strategy at all: find one person on this campus whose office you know how to walk into by the end of week two. “Everything else I say, they’ll forget half of by Friday. That one, they can act on tonight.”
Someone asked her once whether a single workshop can matter if nobody follows up on it. “I stopped needing it to be the whole thing,” she said. “I need it to be one true thing they heard, from an actual person, in a room, before the semester swallows them whole. The rest of the semester will either build on that or it won’t. That part’s not mine to control anymore.”