Improving undergraduate academic advising in engineering: it´s not rocket science

Advising undergraduates in engineering education is problematic at most institutions. The thesis of this paper is that one reason advising is hard to do successfully in engineering is because engineering educators try to improve it with typical engineering approaches and philosophies, to which advising is not amenable. The approach taken by most engineering educators to advising is that it is an information flow problem. In fact, it is an interpersonal dynamics problem, to be solved by improving the quality of face-to-face interaction between individual students and individual faculty.