Q&A with Liana Mentor, Director of Success Coaching Program in Academic Advising
Liana Mentor, Director, Success Coaching Program in Academic Advising.
Following Michael Bloomberg’s 2018 gift to support financial aid at Johns Hopkins, a portion of the funding was used to create a new program designed to guide first-generation students and those from low-income backgrounds—FLI, in Hopkins parlance— through the university experience and into successful careers. This initiative, known as the Success Coaching Program in Academic Advising, is led by Dr. Liana Mentor, who came to Hopkins in 2020 with over 20 years of experience working with and advocating for historically underrepresented students in higher education.
Mentor sat down for a brief Q&A about SCAA, how it operates, and the students it benefits.
How does SCAA differ from standard Academic Advising?
Every student at Hopkins has an academic advisor. Our Academic Advisor/Success Coaches play a dual role: they are the student’s assigned academic advisor on record, helping them with academic planning, course selection, and working with professors; but they also partner with students to identify and develop their interests and connect them with campus resources outside of the classroom.
We actually work within the same space as our colleagues in traditional Academic Advising, and we do everything along the same advising cycle. But we are able to meet more frequently with our students—twice a month with our first-year students and once a month with those in their second year and beyond—have longer meetings, and we stay with our students for all four years. We are also able to connect with our students very early on before they get to campus, as early as June. This helps us understand what interests and obstacles a student might be coming into the school with, what opportunities our first-gen students may not know to look for, and what ways our limited-income students might support their financial well-being, whether financial aid, grants, paid internship opportunities, or budgeting help.
Our colleagues in Advising have much larger caseloads; every year, my team takes on about 25-30 advisees, while some of our traditional advisors have about 100-150 incoming first-years. So, that provides our Academic Advisor/Success Coaches the space and time to have more than one meeting a month and really build trust with a student by being a reoccurring and consistent face throughout their time. I believe success coaching is academic advising, we just get to do a bit more of it.
How many students does the program serve?
We have over 650 students currently in the program. The SCAA team is set in the two Homewood schools; nearly half my team is in the Whiting School of Engineering and a larger portion resides in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences where there are more majors and more students.
What are the benefits of working within both Advising and Student Affairs?
The SCAA program is directly under the Student Affairs umbrella; Dr. Kelly Barry of the Center for Student Success is my executive director. But I also work with the assistant deans of the Krieger and Whiting schools, Jessie Martin and Kimberley Bassett, as a leadership team to craft the program. So, we really get a clear understanding of what the students’ needs are in both facets of college experience. On the academic side, we know what’s required in the courses and for degree attainment, and on the Student Affairs side, we know what student life looks like and what opportunities the partners we work closely with—such as the Life Design Lab and Student Outreach and Support—offer outside of the classroom.
How does SCAA fit in with the university’s other FLI initiatives?
All of our students are connected to the FLI Network, which helps link our current students with staff, faculty, and alumni who also embrace their identity as FLI students. And a lot of our students are connected to other CSS entities such as JUMP, Hop-In, the Baltimore Scholars, and the Kessler Scholars.
What have been some of the positive outcomes of the program?
I definitely think our students feel they’re being supported academically and holistically as well as getting opportunities sooner rather than later. As a lot of people know, we have very ambitious students who come to Hopkins and want to know everything they’re doing for the next four years. We try to embrace that ambition but also help them pace themselves.
We meet our students where they are. If a student is academically set and doing well, we might point them toward research or internships. If maybe the struggled academically when they first came in and college rigor threw them off from what high school was, we know to put them in front of Academic Support resources like PILOT, the Learning Den, or Study Consulting to help bolster their experience.
Do you have any words of advice for our Blue Jay Parents and Families?
I think these last couple of years, switching between in-person and virtual modalities, have really allowed parents and families to learn how to be supportive from afar even when the student is at home. We try to empower our students to find their voice and communicate what they need to professors, to us their advisors, and to their families, which can get complicated. So I would say, allow your student to provide you information on what support they need. Listen and observe how the student’s life may be changing in a good way, and give them room to adjust to their busier schedules and to explore what they want to do.
What is your favorite aspect of your work?
The joy of this work comes from seeing our students grow. Whether it’s a rough start or if they hit the ground running, to watch them grow year to year from where they were to where they’re going is the most rewarding thing. SCAA’s slogan is “Build Your Blueprint for Success,” and whatever that may look like for our students, we partner with them throughout their undergraduate career. That’s why we do what we do.