This month we are spotlighting Dave Schrock, Associate Professor and Academic Advisor from Ferris State University!

What has your career path been like up to this point?

My career path has taken some unexpected and rewarding turns. My first job was in radio at 95.3 CFX in Mt. Pleasant where I worked part-time in high school. I was really shy at the time, but I grew into being a live broadcast guy and covered community events live. I did that part-time for nearly 20 years.

I studied Communication at Central Michigan University, where I earned both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. After graduating, I worked as a software installer and trainer for a publishing software company. My role involved identifying the needs of the newspaper or mag

azine staff, adapting the software to meet those, and then training the users.

After that, I decided to get into teaching. I started at Mid Michigan College and then eventually found a teaching position at Ferris, where I taught public speaking, interpersonal communication, and small group communication from 2006 to 2014. Teaching is incredibly rewarding, but whether people say it or not, it’s exhausting. Keeping 30-some people rowing in the same direction every day is taxing. 

In 2015, I shifted into an advising position and have been doing that ever since. I advise mostly social work majors and they are awesome human beings. I also advise students in integrative studies and liberal arts. These students are a wide-ranging bunch, often undecided about their future plans, but are also fantastic to work with. I also advise political science minors which I enjoy.

What brings you joy outside of work?

The biggest thing is auto racing—especially attending races like the Indy 500. My grandfather was friends with a past Indy 500 winner, so I was bitten by the racing bug when I was four years old. Racing has been a fun part of my life ever since.  

I also love to cook and bake. I try to give my “go-to’s” in our financial aid staff a homemade sourdough loaf every year because that is hard work—I don’t know how they do the hard and complicated work they do each day, but I sure appreciate it!

I also love bird watching. My COVID project was getting a bird feeder. What was in the store was boring, so I decided to build one of my own design instead! It turned into what I call a “mini bird airport” because after thinking about it, birds are essentially little airplanes. It’s comical to watch them land on the wood runway and “taxi” up to the little control tower to get their birdseed. It was a super fun project. 

Your nominator shared that you have leaned into technology to co-create instructional videos for your students related to advising. Could you share what that process has looked like and the benefit you have seen?

That idea actually goes back to my radio background. I collaborated with my colleague, Emily Beard (who also did radio for a number of years) to build a playlist of short “how-to” videos we maintain on YouTube. We got tired of typing the same email over and over explaining how to register and or answering other common questions. We were hesitant to invest the time at first, but it turned out to be a huge time-saver. We ended up wishing we had done it earlier, and it’s been very low maintenance to keep up.  We now have short videos on how to look up a course, see a schedule, use Degree Works, apply for graduation, etc.

We use ScreenPal to do the screen recording - it’s free and makes editing easy. The hardest part is keeping student names and numbers out of the screen while recording, but we manage. Faculty and staff can subscribe to the YouTube channel to get notifications whenever something new is posted. Students and faculty can also share the videos with others when someone needs help. 

Making the videos was voluntary. It wasn’t something we were charged with, but we turned my office into a recording studio, and it has made life easier for many.

Could you share about your role as Degree Works liaison at Ferris. What does that entail and how did that come to be? 

Like a lot of software projects (which ties into my background), it is hard to know how to design and use software effectively, who the stakeholders are, how it fits with workflows, etc. We have a liaison in each college (not all are academic advisors) to help the university understand how we each use Degree Works, since we sometimes naturally work in our silos. I work between the faculty in our college who design curriculum and the computer programmers who develop the software - helping these smart experts to better understand what the other party is intending to do and how we can best implement it. I also test any updates for functionality and bugs before our students use it. It’s a little tedious, but it’s important work.

Being an academic advisor means I spend a lot of time seeing what students see. I am busy showing them their graduation plan in Degree Works each day, so I’m often the first to know when something is broken. Faculty may not spend as much time in the system, so having an advisor be the liaison for our college is a great benefit.  

What advice would you give to new advising professionals entering the field?

I work with wonderful people I learn from all the time—especially when it comes to different advising models and theories. But I always go back to my studies in the social sciences and communication and use those to navigate helping students. That foundation helps me know how to best motivate or persuade them, build coping skills, and much more. Those social science principles help me to understand why people do what they do. So I suppose my first bit of advice is to be a social sciences nerd!

Also, it helps to know the classes your students take with high DFW rates by reading the syllabus and making time for a quick chat with the professors who teach them. Learning even a little bit about common student struggles from the professor’s perspective is very helpful when coaching students. Students know I’m not taking the class with them of course, but I can understand, validate, and normalize their struggles far better if I know what they’re up against.

Lastly, it helps to remember that you don’t have to be a “super advisor” and expect to solve every student problem yourself. In some respects, it’s hard to mess advising up if you are showing students you care - you may be one of the few people in their life who genuinely listens to them and tries to understand. Once that important rapport-building is established - the student is more likely to take most any action to improve their grades or cope with life more constructively. Advisors have the best job ever.