Opening the Door to Publications - Adventures in Advising

In episode 95, Matt Markin chats with returning guest Ryan Braeger, assistant dean for advising and student development at Saint Michael’s College. Ryan discusses his experience creating an institution level advising publication, the pros and cons involved, and ways that every advising professional can contribute to the scholarship of academic advising. 

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Transcript

Matt Markin  
Hello there, and welcome back as always, to the Adventures and Advising podcast. I hope you're doing well. My name is Matt Markin, and this is episode 95, on our way to Episode 100. And on today's episode we brought back Ryan Braeger, Assistant Dean for advising a student development at St. Michael's College. Ryan's last appearance was episode 84 titled guiding students and yourself and finding meaning. We ran out of time during that interview and was only able to briefly chat about publication specifically one that Ryan and a colleague worked on. And I thought it'd be great to bring Ryan back to really dive into the topic of publications. You know, is it for everyone? How did Ryan and his colleague create theirs? What were the pros and cons to it? Does this relate to any way in any way to scholarly writing, and so much more? So Ryan Braeger, welcome back to the veterans in advising podcast. 

Ryan Braeger  
thanks for having me back. It's great to be here.

Matt Markin  
And so for those who may have missed your interview back from last September, can you give us a brief introduction about you? What was your path into higher ed?

Ryan Braeger  
Yeah, well, we'll go the quick notes version of this. But I've been an academic advisor for just about 10 years, I'll celebrate my 10 year anniversary this September. I'm currently in Burlington, Vermont, where I'm the Assistant Dean for advising and student development, but actually got my start as an advisor at Utah State University where I worked as an exploratory advisor for a large center for just about six years, stumbled into the profession, it was not in my 10 year plan as an undergraduate students, I think I met with my own advisor twice in four years. So I found myself in advising really with no expectations, I fell in love with a profession during my first year, in large part because of the community. And you know, before you know it, you hit your 10 year mark. So here I am.

Matt Markin  
And so what's been do since episode 84, since you were last on I think I saw it on a LinkedIn post you had that you attended a life design studio.

Ryan Braeger  
I did. Yeah. So for those familiar with designing your life at Stanford University, they do offer an online design studio process. It's about a one week training on core contents and ideas from that text, and design, your life has actually been a part of my advising practice for a long time, Utah State was one of the first universities to really fully embrace the text, and reimagine their career center as a design space. And so it was kind of a fun full circle moment, I have a colleague and former classmate who now teaches that design studio, so to learn from him in that space was really special, but to also revisit that that text that I hadn't really thought of for a number of years was a lot of fun.

Matt Markin  
Who knows? Maybe that's a future episode right there for the podcast. So you know, we were I was mentioning earlier in the introduction that you were on before, and we got towards the end of the interview and wanted to really dive into publication that you and a colleague started, really didn't have much time left in that interview, which is why we have part two, can you tell us a little bit about this publication that you and a colleague created called black and blue? 

Ryan Braeger  
I mean, you surprised me. I think the end of the last interview, I wasn't expecting you to have done such a deep dive and you found those like, wonderful quote that I also hadn't thought about for years. So it's like what a great forced reflection live. It was really a memorable moment for me. Yeah, black and blue was a snap periodical that we designed at Utah State for Utah State advisors. During this project, it was myself, Brittani Naegle, and Stephanie Hamblin, who kind of piloted this first round of the publication. But the idea behind black and blue and this was pretty early in my own advisory career, this project really spanned from about April of 2016 until November 2018. And I had just started, I mean, this was about a year and a half into my advising career. But the origins of this project really came from my early experiences at professional advising conferences. So I talked about it a little bit last time, but I was hooked immediately, right conferences were this unknown elements of the advising profession that I just wasn't aware of, and instantly gravitated towards that ability to connect with folks from all over. But one of the things I realized quickly is that a lot of the same people go to every conference, no matter the destination of where that conference is held. Right? So you'd meet some amazing people in Santa Fe, and then you met those same amazing people in Vegas. And that community is like, it's really solid, right? And you look forward to catch up and go to dinner and learn from them. But what's really interesting about that, as you come home, and there might be people on your own campus who have no idea that you went, they might not have any idea of what you work on or why you personally are connected to the advising world and so without Well, how do we change that? Right? How do we improve our campus community? There's over 100 advisors at Utah State. And so it was a really interesting question of what would it take to get more people to go out there into the world and contribute directly to the profession in an active way, knowing that you can't always pay for travel.

Matt Markin  
And I definitely agree with with the thought of like, you see a lot of the same people at the conferences. But when you go back to your institution, I mean, there's a lot of people who didn't end up going so like, how do you share that information? So talk us through that, like the creative process, I guess, with with your publication with black and blue, how did you develop it? And who was involved? How much time was involved?

Ryan Braeger  
Yeah, so I mean, it was really the three of us to start with. And I think a lot of the advisors in the exploratory space, were introduced to the ideas early because we were actively brainstorming in the center, we have these big whiteboards that we basically screwed into the walls. And it was just all the things we wish we could have in a publication, what would that look like. But right from the jump, we wanted to have a publication that allowed readers and writers to interact in whatever level they were comfortable with. So there's some sections of black and blue where you could submit a full page idea, or it could be an academic thought, or an opportunity to share your knowledge. But for advisors who didn't want to lean that far in as a first step, they could interact with questions that we that other advisors proposed in the publication, and those answers could be voted upon. There was even trivia night in the publication where advisors could interact with crossword puzzle. So we were thinking, how, what is that entry point? How many different ways can we open up writing opportunities for advisors, whether it's arts, or a poem, or lyrics, or a cartoon, or a blog, or just maybe a formal sense of writing as well, whatever you have for content, send our way, and we're gonna get it published and share it with your community. That felt like a really logical first step. And then what was amazing about this is we had full creative control. And so Brittani and I were able to really lean into that and have a lot of fun to say, Well, every section should have a personality, it should have its own title, it should have an icon, it should have its own color, it should have a tagline that tells you exactly what this style of writing is all about. And then we wanted to see what would happen if we open up all of those doors to advisors, and then encourage them to participate in unexpected ways. The other piece that was so important was we wanted that dialogue with the editor, to be a chance to validate the advisor, and to really see that advisors lived experience. I think that sometimes that's not the experience we have with editors, that we send them work, and they send it back and it doesn't really look like our work anymore. It's we have this really big decision to make. There's also a little bit of that fear if we only can publish in a space once. So oftentimes, when we submit content to a journal, one of the things we're signing away is our ownership of those words that we wrote, because once it appears in the journal, they don't want you to market that article to lots of other journals, because it's their business. So it feels really high stakes. And if you publish something that has been edited, to have a back, I think it causes some pause. And so one of the things we wanted to change with this process was really, this is an opportunity for advising for advisors, that we would want to learn all about their writing all about their ideas. But even that 30 to 60 minute appointment with the author, we had real learning objectives from them, they understand what my what it's like to be an advisor for me on this campus. And hopefully that gets them excited to share those ideas with other colleagues.

Matt Markin  
While I love the fact that like with everyone that's submitting something for the publication, it doesn't have to be like this standard formal what people might be used to in terms of like a research article or manuscript that people can actually be creative with their type of writing and their type of, I guess, explain to what they've learned, correct?

Ryan Braeger  
Yeah, we purposely wanted it to be without a standard format or without standard guidelines. Really, just show me what you have. And we're gonna find the space for it. And we're gonna get it out there before you move on to the next thought that you have or the next experience that you have. Writing is tough, because there's a lag, someone gets to read about it. But oftentimes, we're just we've moved on. We have to capture that in the moment while it's happening. And that was really the aim of the publication.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, cuz I think with a lot of other journals, it's you take however long it takes you to write like, one draft, you submit it, and then maybe you're waiting anywhere from a month to a few months for a response back. And if it's something that that publication or that journal, maybe wants to go with. Now, here's what the reviewer said, now, create us another draft. And now it's on you to then rewrite some of it and then resubmit it. And then yeah, like you said, this could be a 10 month process, if not longer. And at what point that someone might decide, you know, what I just give up, and I don't want to pursue this anymore.

Ryan Braeger  
Yeah, I think what's so interesting about advisor professional development, is there's a lot of opportunities for advisors to have passive engagement. Right? Every campus I've been at advising leadership or university leadership will curate knowledge. They'll bring advisors to spaces to tell them things, whether it's important university updates, or a guest speaker, whether it's a project or a shared mission. And advisors do amazing work in that space. But it is passive. Sending me to a conference to watch other sessions to take notes to bring back is a passive activity by definition. And reading advisors love to read, I've never met a group of people who read more pages per month. That's also passive. But you're we're listening, and we're reading and we're hearing. And we do that in our advising appointments to be to take an active approach to your professional development. It's really conference proposals and writing, those are going to be your two big sources of those opportunities. Also advising leadership campus, you know, committees and leadership's and things like that, but pretty limited to public speaking roles. We're writing roles.

Matt Markin  
Now, with you and your colleagues creating this what was like for you? What was your time commitment? Because I would imagine this is in addition to everything else that that you're responsible for within your role?

Ryan Braeger  
Yeah, I mean, just like any other full time adviser, I think our professional populations these days are anywhere between 150 to 350. Students, and then running different programs and resources for for campus. when this first started, it was really, by definition, a passion project. We were so excited to work on this when we could. And so it started early mornings and in the evenings, right, when students don't normally schedule appointments, or don't usually show up to their appointments, right, scheduled at 8am, I'm probably not going to see you scheduled for 30, you're probably not gonna see it either. So we started to bookend our days, and just block off that time to say, what can we do an hour before and an hour after? The writing process itself was a little bit more intensive than that. And that was our first big step towards doing this was to say, What would an afternoon on a Wednesday look like? If we just had four hours to write just unapologetically, it's on the schedule, we're not taking student appointments. So what we found is that it's really hard to switch modes, by go to work and have an appointment for 30 minutes, and then try to write for 30 minutes and then have another appointment. It's not going to be a great morning, I really need to go into the day, having prepared for a day of writing versus a day of Back to Back appointments with students. And so we started to get more aggressive with our calendars, the more excited we got about the project. And I think there was a shared sense of excitement. And so it was easier to be brave, to say this is exactly what we're doing. We're not in the office, because we're writing somewhere that's use your space to do that work.

Matt Markin  
So imagine you saying that, like you're able to block the time off your supervisors were pretty much on board with this idea. 

Ryan Braeger  
Looking back on my own advising career, I was my first director was best case scenario. And Stephanie Hamblin was incredible. And that's probably why I'm an advisor 10 years later, and did just have a one to three year stint is Stephanie was so good at knowing when to push, but to also follow up with that expectation, right? So there's that freedom of choice and freedom of action. But then there's that responsibility of follow through. So show me what you did with that afternoon that I gave you. Let's make sure we're moving forward. But I felt like in that environment, it started with a director to say I this is valuable to me, too. Oh, this is a shared commitment. What can I do to help create that space and to create those resources for you to try this?

Matt Markin  
Now, let's say you know, let's say advisors listen to this and said that the sounds in I've seen, I just don't know if my supervisor would be on board with the name. I haven't had that conversation, but I'm nervous too. What's your advice for advisors, you know, to maybe advocate more for, you know, for themselves, and maybe this might be a project they might want to try to do? What advice might you be able to share with that? 

Ryan Braeger  
Right away, I sympathize. Because I still get those butterflies. If I'm like, somebody walks into my office with an unplanned question, and I like reading a book, I slammed the book shut. And I feel like don't worry, I've usually way more productive than this. I don't know where that comes from. But there's the shame component to be like, Oh, my goodness, I need to justify, and it needs to look impressive. The problem is that reading and writing does not look impressive. Because you're sitting with those ideas. You're you're trying to see what is my voice? How do I want to present this idea. So some days, you have pages and pages, and other days, you just have the struggle, you just have three hours where you try to write a paragraph. And I think that is an obstacle to this work. This this idea that we have to justify everything that we do. But my argument, I guess my first piece of advice would be to say start small, is there 30 minutes on the calendar that you can just book for daily writing, just a daily journaling, writing practice, one of the best things you can do as a writer is it gets you in the habit of writing about your day about your week, the themes you're seeing with your students, the topics that you're gravitating toward any resources that have been particularly helpful, things that have been not particularly helpful. So I think we make a mistake, when we write down with our audience in mind, you're the audience, this is a writing for you. This is a personal practice that makes you better at your craft. Worry about finding an audience later. But it's amazing what 30 minutes of of intentional writing can do for a professional advisor. And having all of those ideas written down, will become a treasure trove is really a wellspring for you moving forward.

Matt Markin  
I think there's also like a misconception sometimes and and I get it that every institution is different how admin time is defined. But typically, I would assume you could do an hour, maybe in the morning hour in the afternoon, that can just be that admin time that, you know, hopefully, you can put that writing in there or the reading in there. But there might be a misconception about well, you have this two hours, one hour in the morning, one hour in the afternoon devoted the admin time. But your supervisor might say, well, I want you to do this, and this during your admin time versus what you want to do. So let's say an advisor is like, well, I want to you know, utilize this time, but I can't.

Ryan Braeger  
Yeah, and I think there's so much shadow work and advising, where there's a lot of things that I do every single day, every week that I don't put on my calendar. And I probably should, I would encourage every advisor to actually put on your calendar, how long you answer emails every day, that's an hour of shadow work that doesn't need to happen before 8am Or after 5pm. If you're calling people back from missed voicemails that shadow work that should be recognized, but 30 minutes on your calendar that says, the end of each day, I answered the voicemails that I missed when I was meeting with all my students during the afternoon. We give away a lot of free labor. And it's not just advisors, because it doesn't seem like it's calendar worthy. And every time we take 30 minutes away from a student appointment slot, I think there's that compelling reason to justify why I just did that. But the thinking about how do I take those 30 minutes fine and telegraphing what it is you are involved with what it is you do care about. If it's if it's a secret project, that does create a little bit of mystery, but but this because of the approach or you've you've created the mystery, because if my appointment says private time for 30 minutes in the middle of my day, I think sometimes you can say like I write every day journaling is important to me, I'm actually put that down as journaling or daily journaling or 30 minute writing meditation are something that actually defines the activity. And that is a lot easier for a director to get behind. 

Matt Markin  
I think it's also I think you were kind of mentioned earlier about, you know, there's always the follow up as well. So like if a supervisor is a green like okay, well let's see how this goes. Block some time off. They also have to follow up to see like, well, is that is the person actually doing what they said they're gonna do, or are they just now is it just the hold on their calendar and they're doing something totally different?

Ryan Braeger  
Yeah, I need if it's, if it's a whole afternoon for professional development. We show me what did you do? If it's if it's a day every week for a whole semester? That's 15 full days. That's a pretty heavy lift for whatever it is you're working on. And I think, for us, it was critical that we were a team. Getting involved with other advisors to work on something as a shared project really helped us move forward with the project in a way that I think solo work wouldn't have happened. I was going to work, excited to show Brittani, what I had written the last night where the tech piece that we were working on or both kind of haphazardly, or kind of spontaneously learning Adobe, as we need it. It's like, how do you do this? Like specific thing in InDesign? How do we get Brittani's illustrations onto a digital version of the of the magazine that still captures what the charcoal originals look like? Big Questions, but it got you excited to figure it out. First issue came out in November of 2016. The second issue came out in May of 17. Between those two issues, I think there's over 200 pages of original content. There's a lot of content and in less than a year. But I think it's because the three of us were checking in, we're pushing, were genuinely excited to see what the other members of the group were working on and what they had accomplished.

Matt Markin  
Now with your publication, did you have to go through any approval process like with your public affairs, or Strategic Communications Office, or was this something that 100% was through you three.

Ryan Braeger  
It was 100%. Through us, it was really interesting, there is a copyright for you to stay on the publication that was done by us intentionally. So the original idea of black and blue was that it was going to be a pilot for university led advising publications, the big vision was that for every flagship school in Region 10, to have their own publication for these large advising groups. And so it made perfect sense to house it at Utah State because it's a Utah State publication. Early in the process, we did reach out to the official marketing visual group, and we were working with them for about a month. But at that point, our creative direction was so unique to what we were thinking about together, that we actually didn't end up moving forward with the ideas. Do we have to do it this way, like, long as you follow certain templates and guidelines, and we're gonna be just fine. We were like, okay, thank goodness. But we did lean really heavy into university involvement at first, but then we discovered that, you know, conceptually, we were way far down the road. And we were just ready to move forward.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, at least what with the institution I work at a lot of times, they'll they'll give some, some tips on some guidance on it. And as long as you're, you know, you're not using like a certain logo or extension logo, then they really don't have to go, you know, really in fine detail and go through a publication, or whatever you're trying to submit or show to students or staff. So that was kind of one of our ways around certain things. It's like, well, we're not putting the logo on it, we don't actually have to have official approval.

Ryan Braeger  
Yeah, and it's internal communication, which is a big help. It's not for profits. And it was circulating for free on a USU bucks folder. So advisors had free access to it. And we hope that downloaded it and enjoyed it. That was as far as the reach of the publication, it never went further than that. And so that makes it really easy to pitch a project like this. Because yeah, as long as there's no money involved, everything is a lot easier. So we weren't trying to use USU as a marketing tool. We weren't trying to recruit with the university. We weren't trying to subscribe folks to a university publication. They were already all there on campus, basically written for and read by the same people.

Matt Markin  
And I guess that's a good segue into this next question. You publish this. What happened after, you know, what was the interest from advisors? You know, were they reading it? Were more people getting involved in future issues?

Ryan Braeger  
Yeah, so it was a pretty exciting year, we started with this idea, we really got the ball rolling, we had our icons, we had it mapped out, we had our stylistic choices. And then I headed to conferences. That point, I did that. Every conference, I was there. I was hooked, I was gonna be there no matter what. But we use the Utah conference in 2016. As a way to basically kind of send up a signal flare and say, This is something new, we're gonna try this. We're really excited. We're about five months away from from this being real. So we're in a good place now to actually show you what we've done to get ready. We did not have everything written, but we had the skeleton, we knew what it was gonna look like. We knew how the parts connected, and I had some time, but we took this detour to really start broadcasting our intentions. At the Utah Advising Association Conference that year, I gave a presentation called wanderlust really bringing attention to coffee. participation in how to write proposals and abstracts and really shed light on the low percentage of participation among Utah advisors. What we found when we did a study that looked back from 2016 to 2011, was very few of our advisors were going out of the state, to share and to learn about advising. So we said, what is going on here? We also sent out a survey to about 400 advisors between those two conferences, just to see what are the obstacles and challenges that are in your way? Why haven't we done conferences? And why haven't we written really low response rate to that survey, we had about 9% of our advisors respond. But what we did learn was that a huge percentage of our respondents even said they had the desire to do those two things. So forget about obstacles. It's not like everyone's saying, Oh, I would love to do that. But I just don't have the time or the resources or the mentorship, you actually have to convince them to want it first. Then we went to New Mexico for the region 10 conference. And this was the formal call for submissions. So attendees at this session, were given all of the templates and the tools that we had designed when structuring the publication from the ground up. And they were also given rationale for why we made the decisions that we did. But really, the central message at that presentation was go back to your home campuses, and create a space to write and more importantly, create a space to share it with other people. Now, we were really excited to Utah State. So when we when we published it in November, lots and lots of downloads. And an issue too, we did see some participation. There's an advisor biography section of black and blue, that is written in the format of a playbill. And the College of the Humanities and Social Sciences agreed to write little bios of themselves as if they were in the theater. And we were able to create a playbill, introducing the majors, the minors, the cast and crew, the stage. And that being a really cool piece. And they leaned all the way in, and we provided the guidance that they needed, but we had a lot of fun with the writing. And the finished product was just really visually incredible. It was a lot of fun.

Matt Markin  
Based off like people that you talk to like, especially when you're going to these conferences and where people are coming up after, you know, after the presentation saying that now they're more interested in in writing?

Ryan Braeger  
Yeah, every region conference, NACADA will usually host a session on how to write how to pitch to anakata publications. And they give you descriptions of each of their different writing formats. They can a preview the timeline and the process, they show you the deadlines for submitting for certain issues. And then they always end those sessions by encouraging you to get out there and start the process. What was interesting, I think a lot of the people who attended that session that attended our session in Santa Fe, and in fact, the NACADA leadership that were there to teach that session, attended my session, which I thought was really wonderful. And it was cool to get their feedback, I think, yeah, I think that there was an interest there. I think everyone is trying to say, Well, what does this do for me?  What's the outcome of writing a publication? And I think that that's an okay question to ask. I think it's an important question to ask. But I haven't met very many advisors who would write with the expectation of like an external reward. I don't think we have a lot of writers who are doing it for the money, or because it's a promise promotion, or because someone's going to fly you out for a keynote. That's usually not going to happen when you write anyway. And so it has to be an internal motivation. You're writing for you, you're ready to figure something out. In fact, issue choose feature story is way too long. I mean, it's good, but it's way too long, because the topic was data driven decision making in advising. And I think you see that my real feelings about big data advising. And so it starts in one place and and someplace else. But I think that that personal growth is the best reason to want to write, you're going to learn more about who you are as an advisor and about what you actually think about what it is you do in writing. It's incomparable. There's no other way to get to know your true feelings, because you have to wrestle with them and sit with them for long periods of time. But yeah, my impression from session attendees was that so cool, I'd love to read it. And that was kind of the theme of our experience was we were modeling the publication by writing everything write something for this section, or this type of content would work great here. But there wasn't that moment where we could stop writing a majority of the content.

Matt Markin  
Now you're mentioning that one of the presentations you had individuals from NACADA, that that were there. Did they approach you after the presentation?

Ryan Braeger  
They did a they were really curious. And it at the time, it made me feel special. That was like really cool, right. I was gonna, probably overwhelmed by that at the time, but it was really neat. But I think from there first spective I was trying to figure out where does this fit? Because NACADA is aware that there's a small pool of writers for advising work. So the idea that that small pool is going to be further chipped away at is alarming, or saying, Well, this is very, very similar to the work that we're doing. If this is like the mentor out of Philadelphia, or if this is like some of those other publications who are structured the same way that we are, why would we use region 10 as a vehicle for this? But why is why is he recruiting writers from region 10, a region organized and named by Anakata. And those publications are a vehicle for advising to be seen as its own distinct profession, worthy of its own consideration. That is not a black and blues mission was at all. I think once they saw that in the presentation, they're like, Yeah, this is this is different, right? I don't think the kata publishes lyrics and poems and cartoons, or at least not yet.

Matt Markin  
And that's the part I had not yet I think it could be something that they, they could or any, any organization could do something, it's to me, it's a way to be creative. It's a way to, to get information and stories and testimonials out there. And maybe that is a vehicle that brings interest to that that then brings interest to maybe some of their more formal type publications.

Ryan Braeger  
And I think it's essential to advising advisors, present students with this idea that they're here to receive an education, so that they're a lifelong learner, right? Every institution I've worked at, they've included this idea that you're here to learn how to do this forever, how to read how to write original ideas, how to have an engaging conversation, how to push things forward in your field. So advisors need to demonstrate that through action. That's a much more convincing argument. If my students see me do it. So if I'm telling students you should read all the time, that's great. What am I reading? And if I'm telling them to work on their papers, because a critical skill set that they're going to use for the rest of their life? What am I writing? If they're going to engage in the, in the civic discourse with with their communities of scholars? Where am I talking, and and I think to be able to point to a personal practice makes you a better adviser. Because I think that what you've been telling students is true, I do think that the outcome of college is to become a better writer, to find your voice and to be able to amplify that voice. But if we believe that we should probably practice it. 

Matt Markin  
I think along those lines, too, you know, we tell students get out of their comfort zone, try something new. And I think that's, you know, we follow that advice. And maybe we have more individuals that tried to dabble into some sort of writing for or in advising, you can easily justify, well, you know, I got these appointments, or I have this meeting, or I got to go from one end of the campus to the other. So I'm gonna miss out or I'll watch the recording, if it's on Zoom, and then probably not watch it later. Well,

Ryan Braeger  
There's also that external pressure, am I really going to put on my schedule, because I went to the soccer game. Okay, I mean, I have to feel really secure with my relationship with my team. And ideally, it's my directors idea that my director is sending me out into the community. If you have students who are athletes, the very best thing you can do is to see them in their element. If you're advising a hockey team, go see that team play hockey, so that you get it, this is why they're here, right? The next time they come and see you. You're not just saying, Oh, that's so amazing. You said, Yeah, I believe you that it is. But yeah, that first step is tricky. And you don't want advisors who are never in the office. I'm not suggesting that because that would be a mess. But you have to be where you're supposed to be so students can find you. And if you're creative with running late, you might already be taking that amount of time getting to work in the morning compared to what your calendar says. But you're more likely to show up early to work on something that you're really excited about, than showing up early to answer email. And so it's prioritizing that joy at the start of the day, take ownership of it be intentional with your time. And yeah, don't feel like you have to justify it. As far as who you share it with the first person you're going to share your writing with is yourself. 

Matt Markin  
I do like this concept of you know, blocking a little bit of time per week. And you know, hopefully the justification with the supervisor is that you know, it's I'm not blocking out a whole day I'm not doing this every single day. My goal is still to meet with my students with my caseload and answer emails to take care of university business. But I think it also helps with the professional development because that's something else. You know, we hear from various people institutions like well, I there's not really much professional development opportunities at my campus or it's a very general one, but not specific for advising. So sometimes you got to create your own opportunities and this might be one of those.

Ryan Braeger  
Yeah, I mean, you we talked you have to find Your own reason for playing the game, right? And it can't be my purpose as an advisor is not the energy and the gratitude that my students bring back to me, if that was ever my reason for doing this, I'd be in big trouble. Because I'd be taking something from someone as a means of sustaining myself, right? We don't want that. So it has to be through creative endeavor, I have to be able to build something real, that is there, because I'm the one who did that. It's not dependent upon anybody else. That's what's going to help you professionally develop, that's what's going to keep you in the profession, is if these projects and these ideas can evolve over time, and that you're excited to show up every week to see how they evolve, but to also see how they change you as an advisor. We pick up things from lots of advisors along the way, and you can hear those advisors in your appointments, if you listen for it. It's it's such a wonderful way of looking at their profession. Writing is no different, right? You're picking up things when you read, when you write about those things you just experienced, or even if you do a book review, you're actually creating and building knowledge. And that's a real objective thing. And that is what's going to sustain you for a long periods of time.

Matt Markin  
Now kind of looking back on black and blue and getting this off the ground and published in 2016. You know, now being 2024? Is this something that you feel was a huge achievement? For you three, something that you don't regret doing?

Ryan Braeger  
Yeah, definitely don't regret it. I wish it continued longer than it did. I think reflecting on that, I think that sometimes there are like star alignments in your career. And you're in the right center, with the right director with the right colleagues at the right time. And just celebrate that, that is amazing. When that happens. And it doesn't happen every year. It doesn't happen for large blocks of your career. Sometimes. It's just like with conferences, sometimes you get on a hot streak, right? It was one year that I applied for five and I got because you're not supposed to get five, you're supposed to get like one and feel great about the one. But there's other years where yours in the tundra, what you're thinking about and what you're working on, does not line up with the national conversation. I think, looking back on that time, Black and Blue helped me find my own voice. I think that I was ready as a new advisor to explore who I am in this space and what I care about. And how do I express those priorities. Black and Blue allowed me a chance to find out what that voice looked like. And experiments in a really low stakes high reward environment, which is ideal for me. Lots of good things came from that publication. Even though it lasted just about a year, Brittany ended up using a writing sample from the first issue in her grad school application, which was really wonderful. And it cemented at least my mentorship relationship with Stephanie, it was something that we were meeting much more regularly, then the once a week check in. We were starting every day, and then every day with updates and progress reports and work proofs and editing. And it provided that excuse to really form a close relationship. And that's that's the joy, that's the gift here with a writing exercise or a writing project is it forces you in close proximity with people that you normally share space with, but don't converse with on that level? So that's always have a friend, I guess, is what I'm saying when you start if you're interested in publishing, so much easier, so much better to do it with a colleague. But that personal writing that doesn't have to be for them. And that really speaks to, and I've been thinking about this just this hour. But our relationship with writing is kind of strange, right? Most of us have had two big experiences with learning how to write. The first is when we're little and it's empowering. At the start, you learn how to write your own name doesn't get much better than that, right? That's a high watermark for writing in like kindergarten, but you're used to writing or evaluation. Someone assigns me a task that I'm going to write on that topic, I submit it to one person in an authority role. And the purpose is a graded evaluation. Not a lot of people are reading that content. In fact, probably very few are writing the paper disappears once the grade is there on the book. So that's one area of writing that we've all had lots of practicing. The other area is deeply personal, intimate writing. A lot of us have had diaries or journals, or manifest logs or whatever. I'm not sure that we call those. But those are the two areas of writing for most of us either as performative. We're a known authority, or it's deeply personal and private. I've put a lock on it. It's under my bed or it's in a shoebox in my closet, and no one is ever allowed to look at it ever, ever, ever. Professional publication is somewhere in the middle right It is evaluative in the fact that you're going to get feedback from somebody during the process. But it's also more personal than, you know, a paper that you wrote for your ancient Greek mythology history class.

Matt Markin  
I think for me and I like in this hour is just knowing that there are opportunities pretty much in a lot of spaces if someone wants to write, you know, if you want to get your feet wet, you know, you have academic advising today. If you want more of that peer review, then you have like the NACADA journal and NACADA review. But it's also not forgetting that, you know, we don't necessarily always have to publish with in our own like space. And because sometimes then we just kind of create like this bubble, and it's in people reading it, or those that are in let's say, this profession, but you can always publish or try to publish outside of advising and still have it within higher ed, because then maybe that just brings more eyes on to academic advising. And that's always a good thing. 

Ryan Braeger  
The trick to this is accessibility. And that's, that's the mindset we had when we looked at Black and Blue, was accessibility in that we're going to meet, we're going to try to get the advisor to help them do this in the way that they want to do this. And accessibility isn't just an extended deadline. It's not just guided help on a webinar. It really is, how do you create venues? How do you create authentic spaces that are diverse, because we have a very diverse profession. And we have advisors who come from all different sorts of backgrounds, and we'd love to see those backgrounds directly impact that profession and be celebrated within the profession. And so for those who still have ownership of publications, I always strongly encourage that, are there different ways that you can open the door for people without trying to tailor fit what they have to fit what you do? It's that flexibility that goes hand in hand, I think with a successful opportunity like this, I also think it's becoming more important than it ever has been, right? I think advising was the Wild West, probably was just finishing in that area when I started. And it really felt like, you know, by 2016 2017, things started to tighten up a little bit. And that was a good thing. It's become more professionalized a bit more formal. You have what Nakata is running through their micro credentials, their journals, the conferences, a lot of my advising, right is informed by the Design Center and the design your life team. That text is pretty seminal for a lot of folks. appreciative advising is slowly advancing out of Florida, into the rest of the country, right, appreciate it. If you tell someone, you're an appreciative advisor, other advisors know, I'm actually being trained in a school of advising thoughts in a school of specific advising practice, there's some real benefit to that there's a lot of identity capital, right for people to know what I am when I use one word, and that there's a community of fellow practitioners that deal with this the same way that I do. But there's also something lost. You know, the Wild West was kind of fun, because you could learn from anybody in any setting with any background. And I do worry that that might get filtered out. And so for those who have a radical way of conceptualizing this work, we need them to write it down. My hunch is that we're gonna see more and more onboarding of new advisors that adhere to a school from day one, year one. And those advisors are going to start gravitating to those opportunities that align with the school that they're under. And those branches of advising will recruit writers, right for appreciative advising, right for anakata, right for the design studio. But we already know what's going to happen. There are editors there, they're not going to allow you to break the mold, because it harms it harms the whole framework that they've designed. So where's the space to write without worry about where this fits in with the larger conversation? Maybe it just fits in because it's what I'm thinking about.

Matt Markin  
And it kind of ties in, I was going through the the first issue of black and blue and like, you know exactly what you were just talking about right now, I think goes to something that you wrote in there is that there is this common thread of diversity that can be found stitch throughout every department, every university state country when discussing the role of advisors, and I think this definitely fits right in there. And then last question, as we've run out of time, who's been influential to you as a mentor?

Ryan Braeger  
Yeah, I mean, black and blue is a great example. I think Brittani and Stephanie really shaped my early advising career, and in my own directorship roles I direct, very similar to how Stephanie drafted me. So you see that right? I borrowed a lot of that I learned how to do it through someone who's just really great at doing the work. I'm thinking about writers, Peter Hagen has had a huge influence on me as an advisor narrative theory is something that I think has a lot of a really helpful opponents right, this idea that you're helping students craft a narrative for themselves, but that also you're responsible for these meta narratives that you present and persuade students on what a helpful way I think of thinking about their profession. We also use a lot of like George Steele's work on flipped advising, I brought that with me to St. Michael's, I've consistently found that to be really helpful. But I also really appreciate random authors, there was I can't remember his their name now. But there was an article a few years back called predella, advising, you know, your advising practice should be rooted in this, like, awareness of you have a very brief timeline, like you need to leave with this existential urgency of buying that thing that makes you authentic, make, you know, choices in good faith. I was like, how cool is that? That was just so to the point about it. But yeah, I mean, I think it's, yeah, it'd be just thinking about your community is what's going to inform your practice. But it also informs the way that you choose to care about folks. And I think when I started as an advisor, I was probably, I was nervous. So I was too professional. Right, I wear the suspenders and the suit and tie and have the degrees on the wall. And I was almost like a student's auditor, type in some numbers. And let's print out some forms. And it was very cold. And I think it was, I was very nervous. I didn't, I didn't want to ruin somebody, I didn't want to give them bad advice. And I think you have that realization that whatever you advise, they probably are gonna go try. It really gave me pause. But as I had either gotten to know through their writing or through conferences, or right at home in my own Advising Center, is it gives you the confidence to just be you in those advising appointments. And then all of a sudden, your advising gets a lot better. But I can't help but to think that most of my conversations, I am quoting other advisors, I am quoting mentors to my students. And in that way, I think that oral tradition is pretty strong and it just keeps going. 

Matt Markin  
Perfect way to end this Ryan breaker. Thank you so much for being on the podcast again.

Ryan Braeger  
Well, of course. Well, thanks for having me. Literally anytime. I always have an hour.