As our staff grew in size and our caseloads evened out, we wanted to add more advising programming to interact with our students. In deciding what new projects we could take on, we decided to do a survey of our student population to guide this decision. Our idea was to use the feedback from the students about what they wanted or needed more of instead of what we "thought" would work with this population. We did research on advising surveys at other institutions. Using this information we created a survey to meet our specific information needs. This survey looked at student interaction with advisors, advisor knowledge levels on important information and overall impression of the advising experience. We also gathered information on student qualities such as years at GT, residency and GPA. This information allowed us to sort the data based on different factors.

The data provided interesting information and we were happy to learn that, in general, students reported to be mostly satisfied with their advisor and with the advising process.  In particular, the question "Do you have any additional feedback concerning academic advising that you would like to provide?" helped us determine what initiatives to move forward with. This helped our department rethink how we reach out to students and our touch points with various students.  Based on the results, we have now implemented new initiatives this year, including: how-to registration videos, a texting program and a student spotlight newsletter.