Over five years ago, SUNY Buffalo State College faced the harsh reality that academic advising was simply not meeting student needs. Survey data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the SUNY Student Opinion Survey (SOS) indicated low levels of satisfaction with students' advising experiences, and four-year graduation rates further suggested that students needed more guidance in reaching their academic goals.

Spurred by this data, the campus embarked on a grand, multi-pronged experiment to improve the quality of advising and student support. Beginning in 2017, the College operationalized a mandatory advising plan with intensive supports built into the first year, began development on a one-stop shop for academic support services (dubbed the Academic Commons), started coordinating early interventions through implementation of Hobson's Starfish Retention Management System, and successfully applied for several grants to bolster these efforts, including a $2.1 million Title III grant.

With all of the puzzle pieces beginning to fall into place, the leadership of the new Academic Commons Advising Center began to focus on the centerpiece of the new advising program: the hybrid faculty-staff advising model. Using NACADA and CAS standards as a foundation, and building on recommendations from Habley (2000) and Pardee (2004), the College settled on a model wherein each student would be assigned a staff adviser in the first year. Each first-year adviser would maintain a small caseload of students, allowing for high-touch, proactive interventions. The first-year adviser would also be aligned with a specific set of majors, fostering connections with those academic departments for coordinated wraparound services. In the second year, the student would transition to a faculty adviser in their major, who would provide tailored career, academic, and professional guidance linked to the student's chosen field.

This interactive presentation will outline lessons learned from Buffalo State College's attempts to fuse centralized first-year staff advising with decentralized faculty advising in students' sophomore, junior, and senior years. Participants will learn how to build consistency into the student's experience with advising without enforcing a cookie-cutter approach. The presenter will facilitate a conversation about how advising offices can build bridges with their faculty partners to help students chart successful paths from their first enrollment through graduation.