When Advising Goes Global: The IASAS/NACADA Partnership - Adventures in Advising

In this globally focused installment of Adventures in Advising, Matt and Ryan sit down with Miriam Khalil and Sean Bridgen to learn about an exciting new international collaboration between the International Association of Student Affairs and Services (IASAS) and NACADA-The Global Community for Academic Advising! 🌍🤝✨

In this episode, our guests dive into:
 💡 What meaningful collaboration really looks like between global organizations
🌏 Why this moment is the perfect time for IASAS and NACADA to join forces
📚 How their partnership will spark new research, resources, and worldwide professional development
🧭 The role culture, context, and community play in shaping student success globally

Miriam and Sean share their passion, their organizational perspectives, and their hopes for a more connected future in advising where professionals everywhere can learn from one another.

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Transcript

Matt Markin  
Well, hello and welcome back to the Adventures in Advising podcast. Matt and Ryan here, as usual. Ryan, when you hear terms like collaboration and partnership, what goes through your mind?

Ryan Scheckel  
One of my favorite things is the way that we can benefit from other people's point of view. And so when I think of partnership and collaboration, I think about the kind of what some may refer to as synergistic, things that happen that are greater than the sum of the parts, so to speak, the new, innovative and sort of exponential ways that connecting with colleagues can really build for excellence.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, I 100% agree with that. I do think that a lot of times those terms get overused as buzzwords. But on this particular episode, I think we're really kind of seeing the true nature of that collaboration, that partnership. And we have two amazing guests, one new guest who has never been on the podcast before, and a returning guest all the way back from Episode 19, and let's go ahead and bring those individuals on. We have Miriam and Sean and so welcome both to the adventures advising podcast.

Miriam Khalil  
Thank you. 

Sean Bridgen  
Thank you, Ryan and Matt 

Matt Markin  
And Sean, I know we were on a call earlier and didn't really realize that it was September 2020, that you were last on this podcast. So it has been a while, but I'm going to start with Miriam. What we do on this podcast, we'd like to start out is kind of getting to know our guest and the origin stories and their paths in higher ed. So share us your path in higher ed?

Miriam Khalil  
First of all, thank you for hosting me. It's truly a pleasure. So I studied banking and finance at the Lebanese American University, which is an American institution in Beirut Lebanon. When I was an undergraduate student, I did not have an academic advisor, so I did not feel this privilege of going to someone at the university asking questions, seeking help. And I came from a French system where you're not really encouraged to speak up. I mean, it's a different educational system, so transitioning into an American system where public speaking is really valued and I mean, it's a completely different system. I didn't have an advisor to help me through the way, but I had great faculty who served as mentors. I continued my Master's at the Lebanese American University, and I had great mentors on the graduate level. I was, as well, a research assistant. And then I moved to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where I joined advising at the American University in Dubai, where they had an advising center, and I was able to contribute to the student journey. And the best moment for me was seeing those students at the graduation date, seeing those parents coming to me and learning how much value I have added to their kids journey throughout the university. But to me, advising is not a job. It became like a passion, and I started advising in 2010 it's 2025, and I'm still advising, and I'm still enjoying and I look at every new cohort of student as if it's my first time advising and learning from them. So if I had to, if I'm given another chance to choose another career, I would still choose advising, because I really love it, and I love learning from other advisors. That's why I connect very well with Sean, because we both learn from each other. 

Matt Markin  
Yeah, I appreciate that. And you know, you talked about passion. We can hear it in your answer, and I think also just for listeners with this recording. It's also about little after 10pm your time where you're at, so the dedication that you have for even sharing this information, we truly appreciate. And you mentioned your partner here, Sean. Sean, it's it's been, like, five years since you've been on the podcast. For those that didn't catch episode 19, way way back. Tell us about you.

Sean Bridgen  
Thanks, Matt and thank you again, Matt and Ryan for having me on this time. Really excited to talk about this partnership we have with IASAS. My background, it's a bit of a checkered past with education. I was. A very, very, let's say, not as prepared as one should be when they go to college. And I auditioned for a music department, and that's how I got into college. I had this great person who really stuck their neck out and put their reputation on the line, but writing a letter to the admissions department asking if they would accept me as a special talent person turned out to be my actual advisor. Because when you're in music major, your private instructor is your advisor, and he was a faculty member, and he was wonderful and taught me what it meant to be a professional musician. And I think he taught me so well that I learned I didn't want to be a professional musician, and I certainly didn't want to be a music teacher, because I just don't really like marching band that much, and you kind of have to do a lot of marching band when you're a music teacher. Sorry, Ryan, and I just realized that wasn't for me, and so I switched, I actually switched my major to philosophy, and I had this wonderful woman who was my advisor. I just wrote to her the other day, she's a faculty advisor, to tell her thank you for everything you've done for me. Because she has retired several years ago at this point. And one of the best things she did is she actually suggested that I transfer, because I went to the philosophy department that was actually very small, and she thought that I had the something that I could offer the field as a professor. And so I thought my goal was to be a philosophy professor. And she said, Well, you need to transfer to this other school, because they have a much bigger, you know, department with, you know, very kind of renowned faculty, and you want letters from them, because you will get into a better graduate program than if you get letters from our department. And I thought, Boy, talk about student centered and selfless. That department actually used to exist as a department. It became like a service department because they just didn't have enough majors. So I think about where we are now in higher education, and where we were back in 1996 or whatever, 95 when that was so anyway, I also worked as a peer advisor, and I worked, so that was summer orientation, and I worked in the Career Center during the year on a work study, and I sat in that career center and did all the career assessments a million times because, you know, we didn't have that many people coming in. And I thought, well, this is kind of interesting. And it always said I should be a clergyman, a military officer or a college professor. That's what always came up on my thing. And I always was, like, I always leaned more towards the professor, even though I, you know, oddly thought about going into the clergy, because I thought, wow, I can sit around and read and write about philosophy and it's a good retirement plan kind of thing. But, you know, of course, I wanted to get married, and I was Catholic, so that wasn't going to happen. So anyhow, we I decided that even with a PhD in philosophy, good luck getting the job in from a top program. And I had no idea until I talked to my advisors and some graduate students who just said, you know, the job market for Humanities and particularly philosophy, aren't good even when you come out of a top program. So I took a deep breath and decided that I would go get my master's in student affairs and in my career. I mean, it's funny, I started out actually as a registrar person. My assistantship and other in my master's program that paid for my master's degree was in the registrar's office, and I got really into implementing student information systems. It's back when everybody was going off the old mainframe systems into the more enterprise systems that we're all familiar with. And I won't name drop them now, because they're free advertising from adventures in advising and so, yeah, that was my niche. Was taking paper based or very manual processing and registrar's offices and automating them by using the at that time, the state of the art technology. So you know that that that kind of that kind of work, was fun. It allowed me to use a lot of the logic that I developed, the logical thinking skills, problem solving skills that I love to use. But then I moved and I got a job as an advisor, and I loved it, and it was the coolest thing I've ever, had ever done. And I thought this is so much fun. And then my student loans were rolling in, and I got very nervous, and so I took a job as a systems analyst, working again on student information system implementations. At which time my wife, so I'm very old, Miriam, so my origin story is a lot longer, but my wife said to me, you're becoming a miserable person. Being a systems analyst, you need to get back with your students. She said, You know, you were so happy, and I just had joy in my work, working with students, she said, you're just turning into a miserable person, and you don't want to be that kind of person. I was 30, and I decided to just throw my 100% all in and be a professional advisor. And you know, kind of that's where my career really launched in this space. And I could talk about that more if you want, but I think that's not the topic for today.

Ryan Scheckel  
Well, I know that as we talk through the conversations and the questions, more of your role now, Sean will come up, I'm sure, but I'm curious, certainly different backgrounds, experiences and journeys through higher ed, how did the two of y'all become partners on a project.

Miriam Khalil  
Lisa.

Sean Bridgen  
Lisa, yeah, that's true. Do you want to tell them about Lisa, Miriam?

Miriam Khalil  
I can tell them how I met Lisa. So it was my first time attending the IASAS summit in Rome. That's where I met Lisa. And I currently work in Qatar. At the time, Lisa worked at the American University in Sharjah and the United Arab Emirates, and we connected really well that she asked me immediately to join ISF. I joined their board meeting. I became the Regional Coordinator of the Middle East, and then a year back, probably Lisa said, I know that you like Nakada, and your advising background, I think we should do something with NACADA, and I have a friend, Sean, and I'm going to connect both of you together. And that's how the story started. But I don't know how Sean knows Lisa.

Sean Bridgen  
it's not much different. I attended the conference that was virtual back in 2020 because of the pandemic, and met a number of people from the organization. I thought it was just a spectacular group of professionals all over the world who have very different contexts, but care about the same things, and I found that to be just such an eye opening and just amazing experience. I got introduced to Lisa via email, and we had a nice discussion about, how can Nakada work better with IASAS. We went back and forth on a few different things, and I presented an idea that I know everybody here knows Dr. Wendy Troxel had that it was something actually that her father did. And this this really cool way of gathering information from big groups of people, which we can get into that a little bit later. So we presented this idea to Lisa, and she thought it was cool. And then she said, hey, you need to talk to this person, Miriam, so we set up these meetings, and that's how I think it all, it all began. Thank you, Lisa.

Miriam Khalil  
Yeah, she's on a on a ship right now. Semester at Sea.

Matt Markin  
Well, by the time Lisa listen to the hopefully Lisa does, you know, thank you so much again hearing about that. And thank you, Lisa for bringing these two organizations and these individuals together. You know, when Ryan and I saw the announcement through the NACADA email, you know it was announced as like two global leaders. And you know, in student support, I know Lisa brought you all together, but from your perspectives, what makes now the right time for this collaboration?

Miriam Khalil  
I think NACADA is the benchmark for academic advising, so everybody looks at nagada for best practices for advising, load, etc, but it's not always feasible for everyone to go attend the NACADA conferences, because the conferences always happen in the in the US. It's a long travel, and even when they have their online programming, they're on a different time zone, so they're not really accessible to the people from outside the US. And again, the cultural differences between institutions in the US and outside the US. So there's also a difference between American accredited institutions and American institutions, so which necessitate the need for sometimes developing or adjusting practices, adjusting the way we do advising in order to take into account all those socio economic, cultural factors into consideration. That's why we felt we needed to look and advise at advising with a holistic perspective. So NACADA is the benchmark, but then we can take those theories, practices, history, etc, and adjust it to other parts of the world so that everybody could benefit, and we develop programs that are accessible for everyone.

Ryan Scheckel  
So Sean, I think our listeners and viewers, folks who hang out with us on these adventures, are familiar with NACADA as an association and organization its influence, but from your perspective, joining the executive office after being among the membership, what have you learned about IASAS through this process? Yes, and how has that influenced your thinking about NACADA as an organization?

Sean Bridgen  
That's a great question, Ryan, so what I learned from talking to members from IASAS Is that the work that we do in the US that we call academic advising can be kind of distributed across a number of different positions in some universities. And I used to have them all written down somewhere, but it doesn't matter. The point. The point is that we might not all call it the same thing, but across the world, students need a lot of the same things. They're human beings trying to learn stuff. When human beings are trying to learn stuff. We experience certain challenges, and those challenges are kind of, you know, the context might be different, but the human experience, the human condition, is similar. So I think that's where, where this came about. And the idea was that, how can we kind of harness this information from across the globe to bring it into the context that we already have? Like said, people look to NACADA for things. Of course, I'm a big NACADA fan, but I also know that we don't have all the answers for everything, and we need to be more we are. This is the point of this is to be more inclusive of different cultural contexts in which this work world, this work happens. I think I answered your question. I don't know if I went off on a tangent.

Matt Markin  
I guess kind of going with that, you know, in one of the emails from NACADA, you know, it talked about with this partnership that, you know, we could expect global research opportunities, international professional development, collaborative resources. So I guess this question is for the both of you, whoever wants to start with it, can you help unpack how you kind of envision that might look like in practical terms for that global research, international professional development and the collaborative resources?

Miriam Khalil  
I'll let you lead this one. 

Sean Bridgen  
Okay, so thank you. So we have already begun this. One thing I want to mention about IASAS before I get too far down that that track is that iasis And please correct me if I'm wrong. Miriam is an association that has individual members, but also has associations and as members. So it's kind of like an association of associations, and NACADA has joined as a member Association, because Kyle Ross was very supportive of this and thought that, yes, we need to be and it's gives us access to the these wonderful folks all across the globe. And so I just wanted to mention that, and please, did I miss anything? Did I miss? Explain anything there Miriam?

Miriam Khalil  
And their membership also, structure is different than other American associations, and it's divided into high income low income, to make to encourage more people, basically, to join and to learn, to create a community of student affairs professionals who learn and contribute.

Sean Bridgen  
Thank you. Thank you. I just, I thought it'd be important to lay out more of a context of IASAS. And so how are we going to do the things that you just asked about? How we're going to do them as we began to offer web discussions that are that have been attended, Miriam actually collected all the stats on this and has a much better brain for numbers. As a banker, trained as in banking. I was, you know, several, you know, several countries all over the world. I think every inhabited continent was, was, was represented, has been represented at these events. We've done the first two, and we're getting ready to do the third one, to plan the third one, and this is what came from Wendy Troxel's brain. And she said, is actually something her dad did you divide certain questions into research/policy/practice? And so we started out with sort of the practice. And so what is actually, what is academic advising on your at your school, and your on your in your in your country, on your campus? And we got people together, had an hour discussion just to get that ball rolling. The second one we did was policy, the policy piece. So, how is it governed? How is it structured? Is there government influence? Is there not government influence? We had a really nice discussion around that. And the third one is going to be about kind of assessment. So how is how is advising held accountable. Who needs to decide what the metrics are? Those sorts of things? And that's the third one we're going to do. Now, the idea for this was to ramp up this enthusiasm and get this conversation started. Because what we hope to do, and I'm going to put it out there in the universe, hoping that this will, you know, think it and be it right, like. A type of thing that we were hoping that we can pull this off and have kind of an extra event or whatever, at the IASAS summit that will be in 2026 in in is in Toronto, yeah, and it's, it's co hosted with caucus, the Canadian Student Affairs Association. And so what we're hoping is we can, we've started this conversation with folks all over the place who are iasis members, but the hope is that many of them will come to this summit, and we can have this conversation. And then Wendy in her, you know, brilliant assessment, and professor brain has it, and she knows how to make this happen, so that we can come out of it with position papers, maybe grant proposals. It's kind of, you kind of see where it goes when you break the people into these three groups. She's done this before that, and so she has, like I said, that pattern of how this actually will come to To me, it's all like theoretical, but I think that this is going to be a really cool way to start bringing together these folks, and really coming up with papers, coming up with research proposals, coming up with grant proposals, that's my hope.

Ryan Scheckel  
Well, and you know, the the opportunity to connect and and find similarities, to better understand difference, and that kind of stuff, all positives, but it takes people, it takes the attention and the commitment of folks. And I want to hear a little bit from Miriam about your role as a regional director in the International Association of student affairs and services like on a day to day basis. What does that look like for you? And what are your responsibilities in your role with iasis?

Miriam Khalil  
So the role is to promote IASAS like, for example, last? Was it last? No, the weekend before, we had the global association meeting here in Doha, where we had people coming from South Africa, from Italy, Kenya. Canada as well. David came from the University of Toronto in Canada, and we all gathered together to discuss emerging issues and Student Affairs. And the whole point is how to support student so the role is to promote ISS to have more people join ISS for one goal, which is support students and support a community of student affairs professional regardless where they're coming from. So the last webinar, for example, the NACADA IASAS webinar. We had people from more than 30 countries, the discussion that we had learning about how the UK system, how advising in the UK is was surprising to everybody. Many of us had no idea how advising is done in the UK, but we were able to learn about it through the webinar. So the main goal is to connect more and more people together in order to create a shared knowledge when it comes to student affairs and student success. So whenever we have the chance to talk about IASAS, we will do that. Whenever we have the chance to collaborate with people from other Association for the goal of student success, we will also do it. And we try. I mean, we also have, mean, in the summer, as has had a research consortium to create a knowledge about doing research. I mean, everybody wants to do research, but we're not all at the same level when it comes to what is the difference between quantitative, qualitative, what tools to use, how we can use AI in research, how we can find the right partner to do research with, so we create opportunities for people.

Matt Markin  
So I will say, because you mentioned, you know, everyone wants to do research, I will probably argue the point that there might be individuals that may not think that they could do research, but I think based off what you're saying with these opportunities that might maybe plant a seed in individuals, that it's like, oh, I didn't think before I could, but now I think I might be able to do you agree with that?

Miriam Khalil  
Yes, yeah, it's to enable and support people to research because, I mean, we need to as part of our job in advising, we see a lot of trends, and we always we're always trying to figure out solutions. So if we partner with other professionals in the field, we will be able to support our students in better ways, and by having an open mindset and having the willingness to learn from others and accept other practices and develop and grow our practices by learning from others. I mean, that's part of research. It's learning about others in order to come up with better solutions.

Ryan Scheckel  
So Sean, we were You were mentioning a little bit about the initial steps. Yeah, and being systematic, but also being open to opportunity and happenstance, perhaps. But I'm a little bit curious, for somebody who might come from a very US based, you know, campus centered point of view, what are some of the I don't know, the distances that have to be traveled, the context that have to be translated, that you've experienced from your point of view in your partnership so far?

Sean Bridgen  
That's a great question. So the difficulty is that I've noticed is that we come in, we all come into these spaces with our own lenses, right? That's natural. That's how we all see the world. And what we have to do when we come into these spaces is kind of it's funny. It's exactly how my old professors taught me how to study Greek philosophy. Ancient Greek philosophy, forget everything you know, like you can't think about the atom the way that you learned in high school when you're reading Plato and Aristotle. You just can't you have to pretend you don't know anything. And so I enter these spaces, and I think it's important to enter these spaces to kind of realize that you know, what we know is only maybe, maybe not relevant in a particular context. And so I have seen, I have experienced conversations where there's like this lack of awareness that, you know, when someone speaks from a certain context, that they might understand, that the context may not be translated to other cultural contexts. So I see it as I was in a meeting earlier today, and somebody said to me that, you know, everybody looks up to the US, everybody looks up to NACADA for how we do things. And, I mean, I was like, wow, that's, that's pretty cool. And people want to, people think that we have it all figured out. And it's interesting, because I say, well, there might be some institutions who have really good models and have things figured out for them. But it's not like we have a, you know, a nationwide advising, you know, standards or something like that. We have the conditions of excellence, but every school does things their own way, in their own context. And I think the hard part is for, I think particularly for Americans, where we're all steeped in this same i We've been educated in American higher education. We we study the history of American higher education, the history of American Student Affairs, the history of student development theory that was all built in our elite institutions back in the 70s and the 60s as a result of the American notice I keep saying American, the American student movements that happened in the 60s, and how that these student development theories were in student affairs emerged as a response to that. And so this is very different. This is one, one way. And so I think we have to do is remove that, see what might make sense in other places, and throw away what doesn't, and see what kind of it's kind of the Venn diagrams, and see, see kind of what, what, what resonates, what doesn't resonate. And as I think Ryan mentioned before, like the whole, the whole is more of the summit, more than the sum of its parts. What is this kind of synergistic phenomenon that could be happening. How can we, as Miriam said, how can we learn from each other to do better for our students? And let's face it, every campus, pretty much in the US and many campuses throughout the world, have people from many, many, many different cultures, and so being able to understand things as much as we possibly can to translate across cultural context. I think it's just, it's just crucial in the way we do our work. So that was a long way to answer that, but maybe that was a non answer. I apologize if it is a non answer.

Matt Markin  
No, I think you answered it. Now for both Miriam and Sean, you know, you have multiple responsibilities, so if we take off the organizational hat, taking off the NACADA hat, taking off the IASAS hat. What excites you both personally about this partnership?

Miriam Khalil  
Well, I think that, I mean thank you for this question, because this is, I mean, the main added value of this collaboration is that members of IASAS come from Australia, Philippines, South Africa, the Middle East, you know, Europe, and then NACADA is mainly in North America. So having people. From different parts of the world. Talking about one thing how to do advising is very important, because I mean to me, NACADA is the benchmark. I mean, when I started in advising, every time they would look at what is the best load for advisors, all the ID load for an academic advisor, we will look at what Nakada recommends as an academic advising load. When we talk about structure and reporting, we always refer to what was published by NACADA. But again, when we apply everything that comes from NACADA in a context outside the US, we discover that we need to change few things, or do things in a different way. And having convert, having the chance to have those conversation with Nakada directly is a great opportunity, because Nakada are the experts in advising so offering the opportunity for professionals outside the UF to share their point of view their experiences with NACADA representatives is very important. 

Matt Markin  
How about you Sean, what makes you excited about this partnership?

Sean Bridgen  
I mean, this is going to sound corny, but I really do think that we can, we can make the world a better place. But I think education just has and the relationships that students have with the types of work that we do, whether whatever your title is the thing that we call advising, it can make those human connections at universities, we're surrounded by people who are trying to improve their lives, improve themselves as humans. That's us, we who work there, that's professors, that's everybody, the students, that's that's why we're there. We're trying to improve ourselves through learning and to be able to work with others across the globe to help that work in their specific community, their content, wherever they are. I think it can really help to make things better, to move things in a in a better direction. Yeah, I think that's that's what it is. One of the things that I've learned so far is that it's funny that when we had these conversations with these folks from all over the place. We're all dealing with the same problems. It's the same. We have some very, very similar issues. The contexts are different, right? In the US, the big thing is student debt, right? I mean, students have to pay so, so so much. That's the big difference. Students will go into 100 grand, 150 grand, 200 grand to get a degree that doesn't happen in other places, and so that's kind of a different kind of angle that the US has. But you know, all over the world, it's mental health. There's huge mental health crisis. Every school I've worked with, there's mental health issues with students and not enough resources at the university or in the community. That seems to be a universal truth. Students have been are still the after the at the ripple effects of the pandemic are still they're still very much at play with students, maybe not developmentally, where they would have been 10 years ago at this point, because of the different developmental tasks didn't get accomplished due to the pandemic and the those types of things I'm telling you, you're all working with students. Still. I don't really work with students anymore, but these are the kinds of things that we were hearing. It's like, oh, we all have these same issues. And so it's, how do we see what's the same? How do we see what's different, and how do we use that information to help, you know, create models, mental models, research projects, all these things to help improve it. You know, in whatever the context is.

Ryan Scheckel  
Yeah, you know, context we has come up a lot, certainly understandable in this conversation, as three Americans attempt to navigate the hypothetical. So I'm going to ask a question Miriam that I don't know if you'll necessarily have given much thought to it, but we've recently been given an opportunity to consider, I guess, the impact of associating academic advising with a non faculty role. It's been a theme. It's been a thread of conversations in academic advising literature for off and on. And I can't help but notice what the initial stand for in iasis, and it includes a student affairs perspective. From your involvement with the Association, do you have a sense of maybe why? If academic advising has a place in an international community of higher ed, it found its place in a student affairs perspective, if, if there's any, any discernible reason why it wasn't disciplinary. Higher Ed or faculty or curricular places where advising landed in a organizational sense.

Miriam Khalil  
Thank you for your question. I've always thought about this question, like, why academic advising is not a discipline that people go and study. But I mean, if that's your question, right, that it's not something that people pursue as a major. So as an undergrad, I did not have an academic advisor. I did not know what an academic advisor is. I had mentors. I had faculty who helped me select courses, for example, and I think in most of the world, that's how advising started, and then they took the model from NACADA, and then they started establishing advising centers. But most of the people who work in advising do not come from an education background, and I believe, because they advise, for example, if you are an advisor to an engineering school. It makes sense that you are an engineer and you have an understanding of what's an engineering curriculum to advise the student. Same for business, same for art, and I believe that's why you don't have an advising major, because you as an academic advisor, you're advising different majors, so you need the understanding of those curriculum in order to help those students be on track and complete their degree requirement. That's how I'm looking at it. I don't know if I answered your question. Yeah.

Ryan Scheckel  
I mean, I think one thinking about how those who lead and make decisions policy and funding decisions about higher education, often come from disciplinary backgrounds and that kind of stuff. I was just reading a little bit about the history of iasis, and it sounded like the common thread was early in its formation, about similar student concerns, and I was just wondering if you had any thoughts about why those student concerns didn't percolate up through disciplines, but instead found their home in a Student Affairs Conversation. You know, you mentioned how you view advising as not just a job, but a passion and and I was curious, from your unique point of view, if, if there was anything that really resonated with you why academic advising is in that space, as opposed to a more faculty or disciplinary space.

Miriam Khalil  
So what I ask this has they have collaborations, and they do certification for student affairs professional and I believe with the history of advising and the change in reporting between Student Affairs and Academic Affairs, I believe that's why it's it did not translate into an academic major, probably because, up to now, I mean, there's no fixed structure of advising in some countries. It is even in the US, in certain institution, it falls under the Office of the Provost and other institutions. It falls under the Office of the Dean of Students, for example, and with each reporting structure come different perspectives, different probably areas of responsibilities. So Probably that's why we don't have one one track for advising, and that's why it did not become a major by itself.

Matt Markin  
And as we get towards the end, is there anything that we missed about this partnership, that that we should discuss, or anything you want to add?

Miriam Khalil  
I can say that I'm very, very grateful for this collaboration. I've been a member of NACADA for a while. I've attended conference I presented this year at NACADA, but having the chance to collaborate with NACADA, and specifically with Sean and Wendy, has been very valuable to me as Miriam and as an ISS member, I learned a lot. I mean, honestly, the conversations we had the past two webinars where, I mean, they opened my eye on how things are done and other parts of the world, like even in the same region, you'll see major differences in how advising is done. Although the students are similar, contexts are similar, yet structures are significantly different. And it could be due to accreditation, it could be due to the culture, not the culture of the region, but the culture of the institution. Itself and how they look at academic advising. And, you know, I worked in multiple settings of academic advising. I've seen faculty advisors, and I've seen advisors who are not faculty I've seen students who are like graduate student advising, and I've seen other models where academic advisors are full time staff and performing the job. So I've seen all of it, and I've seen that switch from faculty advising to staff advising, because they can dedicate more time to student and up till now, I see values in each model of advising, but I don't think we have the perfect model for academic advising like a model that can work everywhere and in every context, but there's always room for improvement, and that's what Sean Wendy and I are trying to figure out. How can we find a model that could work in the majority of places and regions?

Sean Bridgen  
That's brilliant. Miriam, a great way to wrap this up. I wanted to add a little bit more about the context that the question that Ryan asked earlier about how things came to be in this field, and how did it end up in student affairs in some places, and academic affairs in some places. And I know Ryan, Ryan is much more of an historian than I am. And so I will love to talk with you about this online, offline a bit. But, um, I can tell you that I worked at two different institutions for the most of my career, most of my career. And it won. It came out of the actual Counseling Center. It's how advising started as a separate role from counseling, and from what faculty did. There were still faculty advisors there, but that's how it began. And the other school where I worked, where I kind of started out, it came very much from the faculty. Most of the the the advisors were all PhD students, and this was their assistantship, and they eventually ended up hiring people like me. When I started there, the it was all these grad students and film and Russian study. It was amazing. And they were like, You're the first professional advisors I've ever met. Like you actually went to school for this stuff, and we all had backgrounds in student affairs. I thought, I thought it was pretty that contrast is different. So when Miriam was talking about how this kind of gets, this gets born at schools across the world, it actually is born in different ways at institutions here in the US where the profession itself was was born. So that was the only kind of other thing I had to add. But that's it.

Matt Markin  
Miriam, a non partnership question. You specialize in various types of fields. So mentoring, researching, implementing best practices, but also multitasking. What are misconceptions that we get wrong about multitasking?

Miriam Khalil  
Wrong? I don't know. Maybe people assume that if you multitask, you do not give all your dedication to one task, because you have to perform different tasks. But to me, all the tasks that I'm doing simultaneously are things that I'm enjoying. One of them is data analysis. For example, I love data. I love statistics. If I don't see numbers in a day, I'm not happy. I need to see data, I need to see trends and patterns and trying to figure out why this happened. And what should I do here? You know what I mean, like even the audit itself. Like when people ask me, Why did you move from finance to advising the degree audit? Like you learn auditing in finance and accounting, and if you don't have attention to details. You cannot master a student degree audit. So multitask. I mean, that's part of your advice. I mean, part of being an academic advisor is multitasking. You're working on a student audit, you're working on a petition. Then you have a student walk in with a with a concern, with a complaint, etc. You need to give all your attention. And then you get a call from probably your colleague or supervisor regarding another project. And again, you have to perform so you learn how to do it, and as long as to me, at the end, there's a student who is happy I'm solving a problem, making someone's life better. I'm happy.

Matt Markin  
Love it. Love it. Miriam. Sean this great, great interview. Thank you so much for joining Ryan and I today.

Sean Bridgen  
Thank you for having us.

Miriam Khalil  
Thank you. Thank you for this opportunity. We're really appreciate it.