ABSTRACT
Academic Advising is a structured program existing in almost every US College or university to help students navigate through the undergraduate or graduate curriculum. Effective academic advising is considered a core requirement for student success in engineering programs. It may occasionally involve mentoring students in areas and activities related to their professional success such as advising on internships, co-ops, and industry-institute collaborated curricular programs. Several strategies have been developed over the years to streamline the process and make it less taxing for both faculty and students. Among them are degree planning software, database management, online resources portal, office of undergraduate advisor, on campus student support services, student wellness, and experiential learning opportunities, to name a few. With the recent COVID crisis, as the schools and colleges shifted to online learning, so did academic advising. While the positive impact with in-person advising is well documented and accepted, many advisors found it challenging to translate their successes from in-person advising to the remote context. At the same time, students who typically could ask their instructors or advisors during class for advise now had to proactively and deliberately approach their advisors. The advising needs of the students was also impacted during the pandemic. This compounded the challenges to advising as colleges had to rapidly adapt to remote advising. In the present paper we attempt to study the changes to the students' advising needs prior to the COVID (2019) with those during the COVID (2020) at Rowan University in NJ. Data on student advising was collected via email inquiries over these four semesters specifically for the Mechanical Engineering department. Themes were identified into queries related to course enrollment, course grades, majors and minors, certificate programs, retention/attrition, course add-drop, attendance, hardships experienced, transition to newer learning platform and technical difficulties associated with it, graduation requirements/criteria, career/internships, Professional Societies, personal issues, health/mental issues, and Waivers. By studying the above data, the authors hope to identify how advising changed pre-Covid and during Covid phases. The motivation was to provide insights into which areas to focus and strengthen if faced with similar circumstances in future. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.