From Strategy to Student Support: Shared Goals, Stronger Advising - Adventures in Advising

In this milestone episode of Adventures in Advising, Matt and Ryan welcome Maureen “Mo” Schafer, Assistant Provost for Academic Advising and Director of the Academic Advising Center at the University of Iowa, for a conversation packed with insight, honesty, and a few beautifully relatable metaphors. From her journey as a first-generation student and former campus tour guide to her leadership in a campus-wide advising self-study, Mo reflects on what it really takes to build student-centered systems that work.

Along the way, she shares what institutions should know before launching major advising change efforts, why implementation always gets a little messier before it gets better, how leadership shows up at every level, and why the heart of advising still lives in one simple act: sitting down with a student and listening. Thoughtful, practical, and full of wisdom for advisors and administrators alike, this episode is a reminder that meaningful change starts with people. 

PodMatch
PodMatch Automatically Matches Ideal Podcast Guests and Hosts For Interviews

Follow the podcast on your favorite podcast platform!

The Instagram, and Facebook handle for the podcast is @AdvisingPodcast

Also, subscribe to our Adventures in Advising YouTube Channel!

Connect with Matt and Ryan on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Matt Markin  
Well, hello and welcome yet again to another episode of the Adventures in Advising podcast. This is a, I guess you could say a milestone episode. This is episode 175 Matt Markin and Ryan chuckle here. That's kind of cool. The 175th episode.

Ryan Scheckel  
Yeah, I was thinking today. I was given reason to think today about the numbers that we choose to pay attention to. You know, the numbers that end in zero, the numbers that end in five. And I'm like, if we had a different number of fingers, we'd probably think about those milestones differently too. But yeah, 175 is awesome.

Matt Markin  
And on this day of recording, it's also a special day for you. Oh, yeah, sure,

Ryan Scheckel  
it's the first day of spring break. Is that what youmean, Matt? 

Matt Markin  
I mean someone's birthday?

Ryan Scheckel  
Well, yeah, it's my 50th which, you know, like I said, that was the reason I was thinking about fingers, is that it's, it's, it's funny how we put those extra meaning. We add that sort of value to these genuinely arbitrary days. But it has been, it's been a great time to reflect on things and to think about, you know, what I'm doing and where I'm going and what's happening and and I appreciate everyone who's reached out to wish me well.

Matt Markin  
And we get a very special guest to celebrate, and that is Maureen "Mo" Schafer. hello. 

Maureen Schafer  
Good morning.

Matt Markin  
And great to have you on and Maureen, let me read your bio, and then we'll get started with this. So Maureen "Mo" Schafer is the Assistant Provost for Academic Advising and director of the Academic Advising Center at the University of Iowa. Over her 26 year career, she has advised students, supervised advising teams, led advisor development programs, coordinated transition and academic skills courses and partnered across campus on strategic student success initiatives. I think you've probably done everything in higher ed at this point. Recently, Maureen led a campus wide academic advising self study, and now oversees the implementation of its recommendations, she facilitates collaboration among 10 colleges and the provost office to advance advising strategy, and works closely with collegiate leadership on Enrollment Management and Student Centered policy development. Maureen's involvement in Nakata began in 1999 she has presented at numerous annual conferences, and a highlight of her NACADA career was her 2014 best of region presentation called introverts and extroverts, building understanding and harmony, which then went on to be a Nakata reads webinar discussion on the book quiet by Susan Cain. She holds a master's degree in counseling and person personnel services, with a focus in Student Personnel Services from the University of Memphis and a bachelor's degree in psychology from Truman State University. Outside of work, Maureen enjoys time with her husband Jim and their two adult daughters. She loves outdoors podcasts and reading. Her post retirement career plan is to become a grief counselor. Maureen, welcome again to the podcast.

Maureen Schafer  
Thank you for having me. It's really great to be here. After listening to so many episodes. It's very special to be here for number 175.

Matt Markin  
Yes, 100% and let's go and throw that first question. We always throw it to our guest. And let's expand upon that bio. Tell us more about your journey in higher ed. What is your origin story?

Maureen Schafer  
Yes, well, I, I am a first generation college student, and so I would say, looking back on my experience as an undergraduate, I struggled for many reasons and wasn't in the in the right major, but somehow, some way, made it through. I was a psychology major as an undergrad, and realized that the only reason I was a psychology major is because of a college rep. Somewhere along the way asked me what, what I wanted to do, and I probably said that that typical statement that advisors love, I want to help people. And so the college rep said, You should major in psychology. And I said, Okay. And then I never changed my mind. I never even considered another major, even though psychology wasn't a good fit for me down the road, when I eventually got to my master's program and counseling, I was thinking, this is what I was looking for the whole time, but didn't know it. So, so I always tell people something that really informs my work is that changing a major is not a bad thing, because I should have if you just look at changing as a measure of. Of something not working, I would I would be a success, because I stuck with the same major all four years, but I wasn't a success, so I kind of muddled along as as a mediocre student. I was never on anyone's radar, because I wasn't on probation and I never was dismissed, but I just wasn't doing well at the time, and this was a long time ago, we had faculty advising, and a faculty member signed my blank registration form every semester, even in my senior year, he asked me my name, even though I was at a small school, so I didn't get effective advising. And I wish somebody had looked at my transcript with me to say, Gosh, all of your major classes are your lowest grades. Tell me more about that. But anyway, I graduated, but the most influential experience for me was my extracurricular activity, which was being a tour guide for our admissions office. And I loved that experience. And later in my time, I was in a leader, leadership position within that organization, but because I was first gen and didn't have a lot of people around me to help make that connection to the world of work, I never put together the fact that people actually did that for a living. So the week that I graduated, the person from the admissions office, who led the student tour guides, called me and said, we have a position open as an admissions counselor, and I think you should apply. And I think my first response was, oh, like, people get paid to do this. And so that was my first job, and it was great, and I loved it, and I realized at that point how much being a mediocre student had really impacted my self esteem, because my first job was I found success for the first time in a long time, and felt like, oh, I actually do have some strengths. I do have some good qualities that I can offer, but I had a group of friends who were all really successful students, and so I had this perception of myself, that that I was less than So. Anyway, that started my higher ed journey. I spent three years as an undergraduate admissions counselor. We moved to Memphis for my husband's graduate degree, and at that point, I worked for the graduate school at the University of Memphis, doing graduate recruiting, and then found a master's program in Counseling and Student Personnel Services that was a perfect fit. So through that master's program, I was able to have experiences in orientation, admissions and advising, and realized that definitely, I had found my place in higher ed, and when we moved to Iowa, I took a job at this office, the office that I'm now the Director of, in May, it'll be 27 years ago. I didn't really want to work in advising, to be honest, I wanted to work at a career center. But as we all know, you take the job that's available. So I took the job in advising, and never imagined that I would stay this long. And through my advising experience, I have had the opportunity to teach and to get involved in Nakata and get involved with committee work and do presentations for admissions, and just advising has ended up being so much more than I ever thought it would be, and that is what has allowed me to stay and then, after nine years of being an advisor, we had a vacancy on our administrative team, and I never saw myself as an advising administrator, but at that point, My colleagues started saying in the hallway, so are you going to apply? And I was like, Do you think I should apply? And so at that point, I started my administrative career, and I was really uncertain about it. When I became an administrator, I didn't really want to supervise other people, because I viewed that as like having to have hard conversations or telling people what to do. So So anyway, I've learned so much since that point, that was 2008 that I became an administrator, and I have learned so much about myself since then, and over the years, have just had opportunities to move up. I never planned to be a director of an advising center, but four years ago, our longtime director retired, and again, people kind of turned and said, Well, of course, you're going to apply, right? So the the encouragement from other folks in my life has has really helped to propel me to this point. So here I am.

Ryan Scheckel  
One of the favorite sayings that I ran across early in my advising Administrator role was it's a play on the word supervision. It sounds way cooler than it actually is. But one of the things that we mentioned in your bio was this self study that. You recently led on your campus. What prompted that activity, and what did you learn about your institution in the process?

Maureen Schafer  
Yeah, so we were very fortunate that academic advising was called out in our strategic plan, our new strategic plan in 2022 and so our strategic planning process includes folks from the Provost Office taking all of the collegiate strategic plans and really thinking about, what are the university initiatives that need to be focused on. And academic advising ended up being in there because it was in all of the college's strategic plans, and they said, we see a pattern, so we're going to put it in there. And we were very fortunate that it was listed as a goal under the Excellence in Teaching and Learning part of the strategic plan. And so that's, that's what prompted it. So for the Provost Office to then say, so what? What should we do if we want to enhance campus wide advising? What's the first step? And so we then had a consultants from Nakata come we thought a good place to start would be an external review, just having somebody come in from the outside to ask us a bunch of questions and give us some recommendations. So that's where we started, in the fall of 23 and after that, after those recommendations, we decided we needed to dig deeper. And so we conducted a self study. Then for the next year, we had a group of campus wide colleagues who engaged in a deeper self study in the next year, where we got student feedback and advising community feedback and interviews with advising units, and really dug deeper to end up with five recommendations that we made to the provost office. So it's been an exciting process. And to get to the second part of your question, what? What have you learned about your institution? I think first and foremost, I learned that we were ready for this, like things like this, have to be at a certain point in time where people are ready. And so I think now that I'm far enough into the process that there's a little bit of reflection going on, I think that's a big piece of it, that we were ready for this, that the college advising units were ready for this, this change to say, yes, we do want some help. We want to make sure we're all using the the same advising technology. We would love to have some shared training and shared professional development. So I think that that's a big thing that that we were ready for it, but also that we I learned that we have the institutional support, which is really important.

Matt Markin  
I'm happy to hear that there is that support. And in a way, everyone kind of felt ready, because you don't necessarily hear that all the time from, you know, other groups or other departments at other institutions. But I guess kind of leading into this question. You know, you get these recommendations. How does one go about implementing it? It's like here, Maureen and team, go ahead and implement these recommendations that we have. Has there been any challenges thus far in actually doing that?

Maureen Schafer  
No, it's been super easy. I'm kidding. Of course, of course, there is a sense of relief when you when you take part in a year long self study, and you write up these recommendations, and you kind of go, Oh, finally, here are the recommendations. And then the Provost Office goes, Great, get to work, and then you realize, oh, the work is just starting. So So I think in terms of challenges, certainly that's one of them that you make these recommendations, and then you go, Oh, somebody has to do this. So that definitely is something that is that I would say is an ongoing challenge, but particularly a year ago, at the beginning of 2025 when we started, because it's one of those things where you have to go. Where do we start? Sometimes I joke with my team, with the implementation team, about this process is like when you're cleaning the garage or cleaning the basement and everything's a mess and you're just overwhelmed because you don't know where to start. And so oftentimes during one of those processes, things get Messier before they get cleaner. And so I remind folks of that at meetings, when we end an implementation team meeting after two hours, and I go, remember, we're just still at that messy point. We will get there. But I do think that that we had to really decide what is realistic in the first year, what's our first step? What's the first thing that we're going to focus on, and then go from there? We, we, we. Wanted to have work groups really starting to break down the work right away. And we waited. We waited. So this was a year ago when we started the implementation. We waited until the fall to really start putting together our work groups. So think one of the challenges is you want to do everything right away, and you can't. So we've broken down the tasks and decided, What can we do now and then, what's going to be next year and what will be the next year. So a realistic timeframe on our goals has been really important, but it does seem overwhelming at the beginning.

Ryan Scheckel  
I love the metaphor of cleaning the garage or the basement. And I'm like, there's so many things that apply to how academic advising sort of grows and develops at institutions, and you've definitely given a little bit of advice along the way already by talking about the approach and the thing that kicked it off, and then that sort of stuff. But if there's somebody, or at an institution or an institution that wants to do this process of self study and implementation, any other advice besides being realistic and not trying to do everything at once and having institutional support? Is there anything else that you think is just really critical for the success of these sorts of efforts?

Maureen Schafer  
I do think that the institutional support from the Provost Office has been vital to our success. We were able to apply for some some funding to get a graduate assistant to help with this process, and we would not be where we are today without the work of that graduate assistant. There are so many things you want to do that that everybody on the implementation team just can't possibly fit into their week. So I would say the institutional support is really important. I would say the other piece of advice that I would give folks from the beginning is that when you're on a campus where there are multiple colleges, one of the things that came up in the self study and has come up since then, is a resistance to this idea that everybody has to do things the same. When you want to enhance campus advising, it's really important from the beginning to be clear that the goal is not for everybody to do things the same. We and we tried to convey that from the beginning with with the self study group that to the folks in the colleges. You know your students, you know what your students need. We are trying to help each other to enhance campus advising, but the goal is not to do everything the same. And I would say through implementation, that has come up again, the question of we don't want to do things the same as everybody else, and that has never been the intention. So I think being really intentional about that from the beginning to say what the end goal is, is to enhance campus advising and sharing things like training and development. But the goal is not that we all operate in the same exact way. Great tips there.

Matt Markin  
I want to kind of roll into some of the other responsibilities that that you have, and one of those is you work closely on enrollment management and policy. So I guess from your standpoint, how do you ensure policies remain student centered rather than process centered?

Maureen Schafer  
Yes, so this has been an interesting part of my transition to being in the director role four years ago in the Assistant Provost role. What I have found over time is that my presence at the table, representing academic advising, represents students, and the way that I can represent the student voice in policies is to listen to advisors, because advisors are on the front line with students, and so part of that for me is making sure that I am a present leader within my office and that my staff have opportunities to tell me about things that are going well, or tell me about things that are barriers to student success. And I also work with an advising council that includes directors or representatives from each of our undergraduate colleges, and that's a mechanism, once a month for us to come together to talk about things, again, successful things, but also barriers to student success. And that's what I bring to those meetings. So sometimes that that can be that I joke that I'm like the sticky wicked in the meeting, or I tell my boss, okay, if you hear anything negative about me, it's because I brought this topic up at a meeting again. But I do, and I joke about it, but, but it's true. I mean, somebody has to have the boots on the ground. This is how. This policy affects students, or this is how this policy affects advisors, because sometimes there are decisions that are made or ideas that come up that just aren't feasible for advisors in our daily work. And so I'm the voice talking about what an advisor's day looks like. There are certain decisions that are made at times of the year that aren't conducive to advisors. And so I say I would prefer for us not to do that right now. We need more runway, because we can't launch something on advisors during a busy registration period when they're seeing 12 students a day. So I think to go back to the question, Matt, about, you know, their policies that we make that work for the institution, and there are policies we make that work for students, I really take that as something that's an important part of my job to convey the student voice and how Things might impact students and advisors.

Ryan Scheckel  
So I know you mentioned the advising Council's role in building some collaboration and a little bit of coordination, but could you tell us a little bit more about that organizational structure? How long has it existed? What is like a normal advising council meeting look like? What's the purpose of the organization, besides gathering what you're hearing from other parts of campus?

Maureen Schafer  
Yeah, great question. Well, I have to tell you a little plug for Nakata. Our advising Council exists because our director 10 or more years ago, went to a Nakata conference and came back and said, I think we need to have an advising Council. And so she spent some time collaborating. So our office, the Academic Advising Center, falls under the provost provost office, and then we have nine college advising units. And so at that time, she reached out to get representation from those those folks. Some of the offices are bigger and they have a Director of Advising who advises a number of advisors, and some of the colleges are smaller, so it might be one person. So I inherited that when I moved into the director role, and quickly realized the power of this group coming together on a regular basis to talk about issues related to advising, the work of advisors, what's working for advisors, what's working for students, and what the barriers are. So a typical meeting on a monthly basis would would include updates from different areas, and sometimes that's staffing changes, sometimes that's that's policy changes, but it's super helpful for us to each know what's going on in different units. We might have a guest, we might have a topic that somebody's brought to me, a campus wide group, that says, I want to get a message to advisors, and I tell them that the advising Council is a good mechanism to hear have the audience of leaders so that then they can pass that information on. But we also now have been a group that's super important to the implementation of our recommendations. Not everybody on the advising Council is on the implementation team, so we spend a lot of time in our meetings talking about the implementation things that are affecting all of us. The assessment piece of advising that is part of our implementation plan is something that the advising Council will will work on. So that's that's going to be an important part of our conversations moving forward, but it's, it's a super important group, and I would just say on a personal level, too, as an advising director, it's nice to have peers who sometimes we're a sounding board for each other. And when there are really tough things going on on campus. There have been times that we didn't get to one agenda item beyond updates from areas, but we listen to each other and help to strategize and problem solve. And that's, you know, I told folks at the end of that meeting that we did the most important thing we needed to do today, we can follow up on the other agenda items, so that that relationship building among those folks is super important.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, you can have an agenda, but it still ends up being a productive meeting no matter what. And I'm glad to hear about this that you can, you can utilize those meetings for staffing changes. Because I think people listening to this podcast, it's like, how many times have there been a contact person other department, then you found out, like, oh, they were gone two months ago. But to kind of talk about speaking of Nakata as part of your answer for this question, you know, you've presented on many different presentations, but including Nakata core competencies. So I was interested to know how you can bring those competencies. To life in, let's say, in advisor development programs.

Maureen Schafer  
Yes, well, I have to tell you that I was very fortunate in my Nakada journey, that the time period where I joined the Professional Development Committee was right after the core competencies came out in 2017 so other folks did all the work to create them, and then I got to work with the Professional Development Committee on brainstorming creative ways that the membership could help could use the core competencies to inform their work. So I think that I did have a little bit of a leg up at that point in time, because what's most important for utilizing the core competencies to impact your training and professional development, first and foremost, is to truly understand them. Is to spend time with the core competencies. Spend time really understanding how they came about and how they can inform our work. So, so that was, I think, that that accelerated my work with the core competencies. But from a personal level within our office, I would say doing a gap analysis was one of the first steps that that we took with the core competencies, to actually use the competencies to impact our work. And that was a great first step, because we were able to map each of the things that we have in our training program. And I should say first that I was, I was not in charge of our training program at this time, so my my colleague, did this, this very important work, but she mapped each part of our training curriculum to the core competencies, so that we could get a sense for what are we doing really well, and where do we have some room to grow and from talking to other advising professionals through Nakata, I think our experience is not it's not just our own that for a lot of people, the conceptual piece is the area where you end up finding out that that you're not doing enough. And so we added some components to our training program and to our professional development program as a result of that. So I think in working with the core competencies, the folks on your leadership team and the folks who are in charge of training and development really need to know the core competencies before you can then think about, how does this impact our work?

Ryan Scheckel  
Yeah, folks who engage with this podcast know how much I appreciate the conceptual competencies and and how much we overlook them, understandably, especially in the training and development of advisors focusing first on that information, sort of intake, and then developing advisors, relational skills and and by that point, we're like, okay, cool, go. And it's like a lot of times the conceptual part is the the missing pieces and stuff. But one of the concepts you've also presented on was this, this idea of introversion and that sort of quiet perspective. So can you talk with us a little bit about how advising offices might be able to build harmony across different personality styles, and how do you honor both the quiet reflection and bold advocacy that folks bring to the job?

Maureen Schafer  
Yeah, that time period in my professional life was was full of a lot of growth for me individually, I learned a lot, but then I learned a lot also how it impacts an advising office. So I would say, how do we bring that harmony to an advising office? First and foremost, I think that individuals, individual employees, should spend some time, if they haven't already in their adult life, thinking about how they operate best. What are the conditions in which they feel like they can fully bring their strengths to the table? That's really important for individuals to have that, and I think that's what my presentation focused on but the second piece of that is, I think then leadership teams and folks who supervise need to recognize that and honor that in their people. So it can't just be the employees understanding it, but it needs to be a culture in an office where how people operate and how they do their best work is honored. And to give you an example of that, I mean, part of it's getting to know your people. I am on the far end of the continuum on extroversion. I often, you know, figure out what I'm thinking as the words come out of my mouth. And I've learned that through being in conversation with my colleagues who are not like that. But I would say in my role in the office, when I oversaw staff development, there were times that maybe I needed somebody to talk at a staff meeting about something, but I realized it at 920 and the meeting was at 930 By knowing my colleagues, there were certain colleagues that I would never ask them 10 minutes in advance to speak impromptu in front of the staff. I mean, I'm in an office of 46 people, so it's a lot of people at staff meeting. There are certain people that I just because I know about them and how they operate, that I would never do that to them, there are other folks in my office who process a little bit more like me that don't need a lot of runway. And I'd say, hey, I need an example of this at staff meeting. Do you mind talking about that in 10 minutes? And they'd say, okay, but I think that without knowing your staff and knowing how people operate, you can make some mistakes and create situations where people aren't comfortable. So I think individuals understanding themselves, but also the leadership really understanding their people as well.

Matt Markin  
I think that really ties into this next question, speaking of like, your employees, your advisors, leadership, you know leadership, through Nakata is seen as a very broad definition. Institutions might see leadership as maybe something more narrow. But how do you cultivate leadership in advisors who maybe they don't see themselves as quote, unquote leaders?

Maureen Schafer  
That is such a great question, and it's a timely one for what I'm going through in my office right now. I think that we need to talk about leadership and what leadership actually means, because a lot of people don't understand what leadership means. And so I think my strategy to this is, first of all talking with individual folks about what leadership actually means because sometimes folks think that leadership is being the boss and telling people what to do. Sometimes people think that as director, that I'm the only leader in the office, and I really try to create a culture where I talk about how there are so many leaders that make this office work, but for me, it's individual conversations. We just went through our performance appraisal process, our annual meetings with advisors. And I always like to take opportunities with folks to thank them for their leadership and give them specific examples of how they were a leader, so that they can understand what I think leadership is that they do have this ability to be a good role model for their peers, to help their peers be better, and that's what leadership is. And so I think talking about what leadership is, but also recognizing folks when you see it, and naming it. Because I do have advisors who say I am not a leader. I don't want to be a leader. You can't make me. And if any of my staff listen to this, they will know who they are, and I'm the one to always say you are a leader, even if you don't want to be. I see it. So I think I would recommend that that administrators talk about what leadership is, but recognize it when they see it in their people.

Ryan Scheckel  
Yeah, I think everyone has an influence on the organization and the people in that organization. And yeah, we could talk about leadership frameworks forever, but I definitely think we are considering the way we talk about it in our office, because of the confusion about position or authority, and it's like the teamwork framework may be a way to like, what's your influence on our team, but one of the things that you do to lead in Nakata is as as a faculty member for the Nakata administrators Institute. How's that been going so far?

Maureen Schafer  
Well, that was a stretch for me, and a theme in my professional life has been, I don't have any original ideas of my own, and I am nudged into every great thing that I do along the way, and my mentors and other folks in my circle know that, but I would say that has been such a great experience. I mean, obviously it was just in February, so that was my first experience being on the faculty. But I one of the things that I really love about NACADA is we are a community, and you have people, once you get more involved, you have people around you who recognize your strengths and encourage you. And so I applied to be faculty because of that encouragement from some other key people, and it was a great experience. But I would say, I know, oftentimes in interviews, people talk about imposter syndrome. And I remember at one point when Jenny bloom was was interviewed, and Jenny said she had imposter syndrome, and I just thought, oh my gosh, if Jenny Bloom has imposter syndrome, it must be okay. But this was definitely a stretch for me that I thought, really, what do I have to share with other people? Possible. So it was a great experience. And again, it just further acknowledges the important role that Nakata plays in our lives. Because to be in a place, I mean, obviously I've been a participant at the administrators Institute previously, but to be in a place where people come together to say I've got this really tough issue that I'm working on, or this project or this plan or this implementation, and I need some help. And you watch people sit at a table and offer each other ideas, that's another place where it's not just the faculty who are the leaders in the room. When I interviewed all of the faculty members prior to going to Kansas City, what they told me is you end up learning so much too so, so that's been a great next step in my NACADA journey to think about what I've learned about leadership, what I've learned about advising, administration and an implementation of A of a plan like we have for advising recommendations, how that can help other people in their work. So so it's been a challenge, and I've had to kind of reframe where I am in Nakata, but I of course, at the very beginning, when Matt was reading my bio and mentioned a year that started with 19. I've been here a long time, so I decided I probably should give back a little bit more, but it's been a great experience.

Matt Markin  
Oh, I think you give back a lot more, so not just a little and shout out to Jenny bloom, who's not only been a multi time guest, but also an avid listener of the podcast. So Thanks, Jenny. After 26 years, is there anything that surprises you about higher ed?

Maureen Schafer  
Oh, goodness, well, being in a director role the last four years things surprise me every day, every day. Maybe I don't want to go there with all the things that surprised me about being in a director role when I think about higher education in general and academic advising over my my 26 years, one of the things that surprises me, or maybe is just super interesting to me, is that while so many things change, I mean just the Job and itself and what an advisor has at their desk and what's available to them and advising so many things have changed, but the actual act of academic advising, of sitting across the table from a student, asking them about their college experience, Giving them a safe space to talk that relational aspect that has not changed. And so I think in the midst of many, many changes, What surprises me is, is that core thing doesn't change, that students still need to be seen. They need to be in a space where somebody knows their name, and especially, I know you all have had many topics on the podcast about AI, but especially with however, AI is going to impact our work in the future, that that relational piece of just sitting at a table Talking with a young person is just still the magic that that keeps me wanting to do this, and I'm not doing it as much anymore. But when I'm walking down the hall and hearing my advisors and and I love when I walk by an office and a student walks out and says, Thank you so much, I feel so much better, and I just go, yes, like, it doesn't matter what technology we have. It doesn't matter that we no longer have a paper catalog. You know, all the changes since I've been in advising, but that piece of it is still the same. I would definitely say one of the surprises for my career is just how different it is being in a director role. I learned so much, and I still am four years ago, and to be in the same office for this many years, and to be in a different role, and think, oh my gosh, I do have a different job. So everybody has a different perspective of the university and and of the ways that we we do things so we can all keep growing and learning. 

Ryan Scheckel  
As you know, I was wondering you mentioned in telling us more about your story, your role as a tour guide as an undergraduate student, and how significant that was for your connection to your institution, even though you're in a very different position. Now, is there anything that you see that you still carry forward from those experiences as an undergraduate tour guide to now as an advising administrator?

Maureen Schafer  
Oh, Ryan, that's such a great question. And and really, I do think that there's a connection and part. Part of it is getting to know the people in front of you. Giving tours. I worked. I went to Truman State University, which at that point was northeast Missouri State University, so it's a smaller state school and and often we were giving small tours. I know now I'm at a big institution, and they have a lot of people, but back then, I often had individual families or a few families, and so this idea of getting to know them so you can tailor what you say to them is exactly what we do in advising. So rather than just giving the tour doesn't matter if you live right across town or if you're from six states away. I'm going to give the same speech. We could do that in advising. We could just say the same stuff every every minute you know, at every appointment. But what is consistent among those two experiences is asking questions, getting to know the people, and then adapting what you say to what they need. And so as a tour guide, if it we were in a small town, we had people from large cities who really wanted to know, what is it like here? What do you do? There's nothing around. And so then I could talk about all the ways that we get involved on campus, and then the next day, you'd have a family that was from a very small town, smaller than our town, and thought the campus was big, and you had to kind of change what you said about oh, classes are small, and you get to know people. But I feel like advising is the same way that we have to listen to our students. We have to get a sense for what's important to them, and then make sure that that informs what we say back to them, so that that's a question that's going to get me thinking the rest of the day. Thank you for that. Love it.

Matt Markin  
We wrap up. You love podcasts. You love reading, aside from adventures and advising, what are you listening to, or what are you reading right now? That's shaping your thinking.

Maureen Schafer  
Oh, it's shaping my thinking. I love hearing people's stories and so of course, that's what I love about your podcast. I do listen to the pickup meeting with Kevin and Brody. And then there is a leadership podcast called the Maxwell leadership podcast that I listened to on a regular basis. And that definitely shapes my thinking about my my leadership role. And then as as something not work related, I really love Anderson Cooper's podcast called all there is, and that is a podcast about grief and about processing grief, and that is related to just kind of a side interest that I have. But I really love his podcast. I just finished a really good fiction book, and I really have found over time, I used to only read nonfiction, and now I have found that that fiction really helps me to just think about bigger issues in life and people's stories. And there's a popular book right now called Theo of golden and it's just a wonderful story that that just kind of leaves you with thinking about life and your connections to other people, and the meaning that you're making and other people's lives. So that was one that when I finished, I it was I didn't want it to end, so that that's the most recent Awesome.

Matt Markin  
Well, Maureen, this has been a fabulous interview, and this has been great to have you on episode 175 thank you so much for joining us today.