r/studentaffairs

I am guessing I need to apply for a PhD in education administration, but should I do it after undergrad or after masters? How competitive are these six figure roles?

Hi ya’ll, I wanted to inquire about how I can get into a res life position. I’m currently working as a crisis counselor at a crisis unit for kids and have been doing this for the past 3 years. I want to pivot to higher education though since I got my masters in counseling in higher ed back in 2023 but haven’t landed a role in the student affairs field. I’d say I’ve gotten pretty comfortable in my current role due to the schedule (3/12’s) but don’t really have opportunities for growth unless I were to go back to school for a degree in social work or something (which I don’t really want to do due to my student loans). I want to utilize my master’s degree and start gaining new skills and I’m hoping a res life position would be a good start (mainly because it’d be nice not having to pay rent). Do ya’ll have any tips?

Also I’m currently in California and I’m pretty open in terms of applying to out of state but I would prefer to stay in California or move to another blue state. I also have had an internship at a multicultural center at a CSU and an internship in a student disability center.

Hi everyone! I’m a fourth year undergrad who will be graduating in a few months. I’ve worked as a student assistant throughout college, and have really enjoyed being involved on campus and working directly with students in orientation, first year experience, and campus events.

Work doesn’t feel like work for me. I find fulfillment in supporting students, and I feel like I’m in my natural element when I’m on campus.

However, I also know that as a student assistant, I’ve likely been shielded from its more challenging aspects. Please give me a reality check. Help me demystify my romanticization of this field, as someone who is considering going to grad school for student affairs.

Considering trends of budget cuts, decreasing student enrollment, burnout, and AI making roles obsolete/consolidated, what else should I know about student affairs as a career?

Thank you.

I am considering pursuing either a M.Ed in (Higher Education Student Affairs) or a MSW (Master of Social Work). I am seeking insights from those already working in these fields? Both programs are set to start in August 2026

I work as an academic advisor at an online university. I have around 350 students on my roster. I’m wondering if you guys think these duties are appropriate for advisors, or if you think it’s too much? I’m feeling very overwhelmed, especially since every time another department complains about their workload, our institution’s response is to place some of their tasks on us in advising. It seems to me that each department should be handling what their job duty states, and if that’s too much, they need to hire more people.

I also don’t know how to approach this with leadership without sounding like a complainer. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Here are our current duties:
-Daily attendance
-Responding to 50+ emails daily
-Returning student phone calls
-Tracking enrollment verifications, background checks, transcripts, etc.
-Answering questions about financial aid, including questions pertaining to the Big Beautiful Bill
-Setting up self-directed assessments for our students as well as for incoming students
-Setting up and sending out appeal forms for current and re-enter students
-Tracking/outreaching students with high account balances
-Graduation liaisons (answer questions relating to graduation ceremonies)
-Training new advisors
-Completing schedules and schedule revision requests
-Creating and frequently updating a list of students we expect to drop by end of quarter
-Rescheduling failed grades

Hello! I am an American who recently moved back to Valencia, Spain to join my husband. I now have a residency permit here, and I speak both English and Spanish. I have been teaching in the United States and abroad since 2018, including teaching English in Spain for three years. With my recent move back to Spain, I'm trying to figure out what my next career move will be.

I have a bachelor's in Education and a master's in Instructional Design. Additionally, I've developed a strong interest in digital marketing, so I'm currently taking the Google Digital Marketing certification course. While I do love teaching, I'm ready to expand my professional experience outside the classroom and transition into other roles, such as higher education, or potentially marketing. When I first moved to Spain in 2020, I moved here on my own, and I loved every moment of that experience. Because of that, I've also been considering a career in study abroad advising.

My question is: Has anyone successfully worked in ID or student advising abroad, specifically in Spain or in a remote role? TYIA!

hi everyone!

it had been a minute since I applied to a new role and I recently submitted an application to a new role at a new institution and I am struggling to determine a realistic timeline of how long I can hold on to hope to get a call back for an interview before I should switch my mindset to it most likely being a no.

it’s been about 2.5 weeks since i submitted my application & the deadline to submit was around the same time. do you typically hear back that fast? does it normally take a bit longer?

any insights would help so i don’t hold on to hope for too long!

I’m an advisor at a large public university, and I also do heavy recruitment work (visiting w/ high schoolers, sometimes going to high schools). I’m planning on getting my hair dyed and doing a few blocks of color (probably pink or purple). Here’s an example: https://pin.it/Nq9A5pYiI

I already have a few face piercings and visible tattoo sleeves, but for some reason I’m wondering if the pink hair is going too far/will be taboo in this environment. I’m not worried enough to not do it…but curious what others think! Other info: my office has no dress code, many faculty in the department dress nice but the other advisors often wear athleisure/less than business casual.

Thoughts/experiences?

I am interested in pursuing a masters in Higher Education Administration and had a few questions before I actually fully consider going this route and applying to schools. They are listed here:

- What are my chances of finding a job upon graduation?

- Would the internship that is part of my program help me find a full-time job in the university that I am interning at?

- Should I complete the program online or in-person? I see most programs can be completed either in person or online, and am undecided on the best route that I should take if I pursue this masters.

I recently cold emailed a couple of professors about research opportunities, and they responded positively and invited me to meet for a “chat” to learn more about my interests and goals.

I understand these are informal conversations rather than structured interviews, but I’m curious about how they typically function in practice and what professors are usually looking for in these meetings.

For those who have gone through this process especially for science rsearch positions... What usually happens in these conversations? How evaluative are they from the professor’s perspective? What tends to make a student stand out?Are there common pitfalls or things to avoid during the in person chats?

Any advice or personal experiences would mean a lot for me

Thank you!

I've been looking for scholarships , when I came across what's called "Graduate Assistantship" .

I wanted to ask

_what do you do exactly?

_ Is working and studying at the same time?

_The benefits of it ?

I have a

Master's in Marketing

Bachelor in English .

I just accepted a position as an Academic Advisor, specifically working with first-years and teaching first-year seminar courses. As someone starting their first full time job, I would appreciate any tips or advise!

I would appreciate advice from folks who work with students directly and are expected to provide a lot of emotional labour to students.

For context, I work as an Academic Advisor for an undergrad. This past year has been very challenging for me with a major restructuring and more specifically the type of students I now see. I started working with current degree students and students who want to transfer into this faculty.

With transfer students I get a lot of “trauma dumping” where a student will disclose a very serious/graphic trauma to me, typically after I have told them how competitive transferring is. I’m not trying to rate trauma, but when I say serious I mean graphic descriptions of s.assault, childhood abuse, or domestic violence. In the Fall semester I was dealing with 2-10 disclosures a week.

As September is fast-approaching, I am already feeling the anxiety around this. I’m still recovering from the burnout of last year and I would appreciate genuine advice from people who deal with this type of labour. Any advice you have is appreciated, but specifically on:

-I know I need to “leave it at work” but HOW do you leave it at work? How do you not bring it home with you and think about it later? Specific steps/tools you use would be great.
-What phrases do you say when you are trying to set boundaries while also being compassionate?
-For those who see several students a day, how do you navigate back to back appointments after something traumatic happens?
-How do you navigate emotional labour when you feel like there is not much left to give?
-What tools or techniques do you take to recover quickly without transferring onto the next student?

Thank you for your time. I understand that many of you feel this is what academic advising requires and may find this type of thing “typical” but I am struggling and just seeking some help from the community.

*as a note, I am not staying in this field as I am clearly not cut out for this. I need to survive until I find something new!

Is my workload normal for a Compliance Coordinator and how do I get hired elsewhere given my background?

I work in compliance at a small university and want a reality check on whether my responsibilities match my title, and also some advice on how to even apply elsewhere given my weird career path.

I hold a dual role covering institutional compliance and federal student benefits administration for several hundred students across multiple campuses, and I have been in this position for less than a year. I am also the institution's subject matter expert for veteran educational benefits, and I train other staff in that area as well.

On the compliance side I built and maintain regulatory reporting workflows across around half a dozen federal and state frameworks, automated several of those processes cutting reporting time by tens to hundreds of hours, and built BI dashboards and data pipelines from scratch to support executive decision making. I am the sole designer of the institution's financial aid fraud detection program which has prevented hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraudulent disbursements. I am also the only person who reviews and approves all outgoing marketing materials for compliance, and I deliver compliance onboarding training to every new hire across all departments.

On the student services side I train and supervise additional staff on a huge portion of the backend administrative work required for our student body to actually utilize their benefits each semester, and personally conduct individualized student support counseling meetings with every new student that falls into my demographic, which makes up around 90% of our population. We are talking hundreds of these meetings per semester.

I want to be clear that this is not everything, just the highlights. Beyond this I also functionally serve as the lead across several different areas of administration within both compliance and the admissions process.

My question on title is simple: what should someone doing all of this actually be called, especially less than a year in? And to add context, I am doing all of this in a very high cost of living area at a salary that is significantly below what you would expect for this scope of work. I am not planning on leaving anytime soon, but I do keep an updated resume and honestly it is kind of ludicrous to look at a growing list of responsibilities like this sitting next to a sub one year tenure and a title like coordinator.

The harder question is about hiring. Before this role I spent several years doing compliance and certification work at the university I attended as a student, but most people read that as an internship. Before that I spent several years in the military in an analytical role that does not translate cleanly on paper. My degree is technical and unrelated to higher ed.

So despite having close to 10 years of real work experience I basically look like a new grad on paper. Has anyone navigated applying to mid or senior level roles in higher ed compliance or institutional research with a background like this? How do you get past the HR filter?

Hello hello!
I’m wondering how many of you work at universities that implement some form of summer/common read, whether it be a university-wide initiative or just within one college program.

I’ve done both a university-wide common read and am currently working somewhere that it’s just our academic college doing it. Overall, it’s received well (depends on the book, of course!!), but it’s the logistics of it that really start to get to me. For those of you working at schools with a common read:

1. How are you getting the material to the students? Are they responsible for getting it themselves or is it something your department/university pays for?
2. Are you going with physical books, ebooks, audio books, or something else?

We have been using Amazon Bookshelf for years now and overall I’m not impressed. The issues we have reported over the years have still to be fixed, the overall UI is clunky, and everything goes to shit if the book changes cost, which happened to us over the weekend. Now, I’m spending an entire day individually revoking our previous voucher and trying to get one with updated book costs out there- it’s well over a thousand vouchers that need adjusting for our students, and this Isn’t the first year this happened to us.

I just don’t feel like there is any streamlined way to get summer read books to 1,000+ students and it… makes sense? Like, Amazon bookshelf is really bonuses friendly haha. I want to find a way to be able to cover the cost for students, be able to edit the voucher list en masse if a problem pops up, etc.

Do any of you have experiences and resources you’d be able to share? Please tell me the perfect summer reading platform is out there, and I’ve just not found it yet😭

quick edit: I accidentally submitted this post because my needy & greedy cat was bumping his face against my phone for pets LOL. Apologies!

Hi everyone,

I recently appeared for CUET and I'm trying to shortlist colleges/universities for admission.

My biggest priority is government colleges that accept admissions through CUET. I'm not very interested in DU and Allahabad University, so I'm mainly looking for other good government universities.

I secured 425 marks in PCB+English as an OBC category candidate.

A few details:

• Female student from India
• Looking for undergraduate admission through CUET
• Open to universities in Northeast India, Lucknow, or other states as well, would really appreciate if it's safe for women.
• Prefer affordable government institutions
• Good academics and campus environment are more important than college "hype"
• Hostel availability is a plus

Could you suggest government colleges/universities that:

1. Accept CUET scores
2. Have decent placements or higher-study opportunities
3. Are worth considering besides DU, BHU, and AU

I'm looking for the course in the following priority:
Bsc Biotech>Bsc microbiology>Bsc life science>Bsc Zoology.
I'm also open for Hons.

Thanks!