Budgeting issues cause changes every year in the counseling staff and it leaves some students unsatisfied with help and advice that is given to them.
“Every year there’s a process and its called the Faculty Needs Identification Committee… They have to write a report saying ‘this is why we need a faculty member’ Depending on what the budget process is it will determine how many we’re allowed to hire,” said Lucinda Over, Dean of Counselors. This process is only used to hire full-time counselors, not adjunct.
A request is usually filed in October and faculty usually hears back from the FNIC in February or March, according to Over. She said there are more adjunct counselors because she doesn’t have to go through the same process to hire them as she does for a full-time counselor. There is a set budget set aside that can be used to hire adjunct counselors when needed.
Over also described the process to hire part-time counselors as “less cumbersome.”
Over said there are 22 full-time counselors and 55 part-time counselors on staff this semester. Part-time adjunct counselors only work up to 20 hours a week and a lot of the full-time counselors are assigned to a specific program.
You would have to be in one of those programs to get the guaranteed continued help from the same person.
Often times, adjunct counselors will also work at multiple schools and will quit once they have been offered a full-time job or have been fired.
“If I was them I would just be like, miserable having to jump to (multiple) schools at a time,” said Mackenzie Fick, a chemistry major at Citrus.
Changes in the number of Adjunct counselors occur every year depending on the budget and whether the counseling faculty feel they need more counselors or less, Over said.
“With adjunct, if it’s a really rough year we might not be able to keep everyone,” she said.
One of the problems encountered by students is talking to multiple counselors and getting contradicting advice from different counselors.
“Thats kind of annoying id rather just be with someone that knows me… I told the second counselor what the other counselor told me and she was like, ‘no that’s crazy you don’t need to do that,’” Fick said.
Over said that most of the times when students receive contradicting advice it’s because they switch majors or other major factors in their educational plan that would mean a change of requirements of courses.
Fick, who has seen three different counselors during her time at Citrus said the “first (counselor) was so bad, she just didn’t understand what I wanted at all and didn’t seem very helpful at all and just seemed like she wasn’t trying to get me out of here any faster.”
Fick said she was told to take classes that had nothing to do with her major by one counselor.
Melanie Sandoval, a chemistry major at Citrus, expressed her dislike in having to re-explain her educational situation each time she went in to see a new counselor.
“I would not like to have to keep repeating myself and say my like spiel kind of story of how I came here and how I’m doing at citrus…,” Sandoval said.“They say at a public university you’re just kind of a number and you would think at a community college which is smaller even if it has all kinds of people coming and going, you would think it’s a little bit more personal.”
For adjunct, working at multiple schools means having to not only work with more students but also having to meet the expectations by each school a counselor is employed at.
“Maybe they’re not as focused on what this campus would have to offer. They just kind of know the basics… which I wouldn’t blame them because I guess they’re trying to make a living.” Sandoval said.
More often than not these run-ins with adjunct faculty are brief and shallow.
For example, http://assist.org an online service that counselors often use to help guide students, is available to anyone without having to see a counselor.
“If (counselors) kind of put a personal touch to it, it will be really helpful,” Sandoval said. ”If you’re just real instead of reading from assist.org what (students) need and what (students) don’t need,” said Sandoval. “If you really just have a conversation and you do put technical information in… it’ll yield a better result for the student and the experience would be better and thus counseling would be looked at better on campus.
Over suggests figuring out your comprehensive educational plan as soon as possible to make sure the counselors seen will all go in the same direction. She said, “The more specific you are in what your goal is the more precise the advice.”
Sandoval described adjunct counseling as “almost like public defenders.” She believes it’d be more beneficial if the counselors had a “shared kind of consciousness” so the advice given does not greatly differ from counselor to counselor.
