Staff members from our student communities and Career and Community Learning Center have presented at a number of on- and off-campus conferences, and they have also made several contributions to the professional literature associated with student services. These presentations and papers have, as we might expect, drawn heavily on extensive experience in higher education. It strikes me, however, that our advisers and counselors are well-positioned not only to discuss our many support services but they are also ideally situated to help shape the future work of our unit and undergraduate education more broadly by better connecting our work with students to opportunities to undertake targeted research about undergraduate issues.

Becoming more fully engaged in connecting research, learning, and support services requires a more systemic approach to collecting and analyzing the data resulting from our interactions with students. Advising appointments, for example, offer a rich source of potential data about undergraduate trends, perceptions, and needs. Our appointments currently tend to help only individual students. If we can better connect the information available across our communities and units, however, our individual efforts might be leveraged to assist a much larger number of students. This would increase both our efficiency and our effectiveness at little or no additional cost to students or the institution.

If done with the kind of care and attention demonstrated by our staff in past efforts, development of a CLASS research culture should further improve the quality of our contacts with students because effective advising and a successful research methodology both rely in part on the ability to ask good questions. Good advising questions, in turn, require a thorough knowledge of the curricular requirements and offerings available on campus and the ability to effectively communicate those expectations and opportunities to our students.

Such knowledge is also required by competent research design. Advising questions, therefore, can provide a basis for further research about our undergraduates. Our personal interactions with students and the resulting feedback have the potential to drive a deeper and more nuanced understanding than is currently provided by our point-of-service and senior exit surveys. I encourage each staff member to begin thinking about the research opportunities afforded by our interactions with students. Are there particular questions that we should be asking each of our students? What are those questions? How do we track and analyze the responses? If you have any suggestions along these or related lines, please do not hesitate to contact me with your ideas at mtaylor@class.cla.umn.edu.

Enhancing our research efforts not only promises to contribute to staff professional development and the University's core mission but also ultimately strengthens our ability to provide excellent student service by increasing our knowledge about the students we serve.