The Center for Advising and Academic Services is offering advisement services to freshmen and undeclared students, as well as students exploring options for their major and tracking their completion towards a degree. The program is ne¬w for the current school year.

Prior to the center’s creation, a faculty advising system was put into place, in which a student would be assigned one faculty member to act as their academic advisor. The advisement offices within the Dean’s Offices worked in conjunction with this system. For students who were changing their major, changing schools, or affected by faculty changes, the previous system lead to confusion amongst students as to where they should best seek advisement.

“Students found that they could ask a lot of people the same question and get a lot of different answers,” Laurie Wenchell, senior director of the Center for Advising and Academic Services, said. “Which is never, I think, the best way. So it had come up more than once…is it time to look at advising again?”

Wenchell said that the purpose of the new Center is to serve Iona students as a whole.

“The College itself saw, if we can look at centralizing advising, at least for freshmen and undeclared students, and then we can look at how we work with students as they progress towards degree completion in support of a major advisor, we would feel that students would be given what is that ‘before the fact’ rather than ‘after the fact’ kind of support,” Wenchell said.

Wenchell said the Center is in place to support students who already have a major advisor as well. Students tracking their progress towards their degree can seek advisement, targeting who would be in danger of being short a few credits for graduation.

The Center for Advising and Academic Services is located at the far end of the Ryan Library, where the old CELTIC office used to be (next to Amend Hall). The CELTIC office is now located inside the Ryan Library at the former location of the Castle Cafe.

The Center for Advising and Academic Services is made up of advisors from both schools. Wenchell and Stephen Scollard are both from the School of Arts and Science. Patti Ingraham and Nicole DiPiano ‘10 are from the School of Business. Latoya Attis will soon be joining the office as an academic advisor formerly from the Student Financial Services Office.