August 6, 2009
Adviser of the Year Balston enjoys helping students find their way
When Kay Balston graduated from high school 40 years ago, she didn’t head right off to college. “My parents told me I was going to get married, so I didn’t need to go to college,” Balston said.
She did indeed get married, then traveled with her husband — who was in the military — to one post after another. And as she traveled, she went to one college after another, taking a course here, a course there. She finally finished her degree in history years later while working at Pacific Lutheran University.
Small wonder that Balston ended up working in a job helping students to succeed, and that she’s done it so well that she was named Adviser of the Year by the UW’s Association of Professional Advisers and Counselors. It’s an honor given to just one of the University’s many advisers each year.
“I just love working with students,” Balston said. “It really is my strength.”
She started at PLU, where she was the coordinator of social science graduate programs. But that was more of an administrative role, providing her with just enough student contact that when she saw an adviser position open at Highline Community College, she went for it.
Balston was hired by Lance Gibson, director of counseling at Highline, who became her mentor. “He helped me learn — not just the information you need as an adviser, but the nonverbal cues that students give you and how to deal with challenging situations,” she said. “He pushed me to learn all I could about working with students.”
She learned so well that eventually she became director of advising at Highline, earning a master’s degree in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies from the UW’s College of Education along the way. But Balston found that her administrative duties limited the time she had to work with students, and she missed that.
So when there was an opening in the UW’s Gateway Advising Center, Balston was ready to give up her supervisory role. “I had known advisers in this office and worked with them for quite a long time,” she said. “I haven’t regretted making the move.”
The Gateway Center serves mostly freshmen and sophomores, and Balston has specialized in pre-nursing and other students interested in the health sciences. An adviser is, she said, a guide:
“I don’t see my job as telling students what to do. What I want is to understand what their needs are, then give them a series of options and help them struggle with making a decision — whether it’s about choosing a major, or how to handle a situation like trying to balance work and school and life. An adviser’s role is to be supportive to students, encouraging them and making sure they get accurate information in a timely way, and occasionally giving them a little bit of a push or a ‘Hey, what’s going on with you?’ when they need it.”
Balston was deeply involved in developing the “Roadmap to Choosing a Major” workshop — a 90-minute session that involves the UW Career Center and Counseling Center as well as the Gateway Center. The workshop doesn’t answer questions about specific majors, Balston said, but rather helps students to analyze their interests and values and then match these up with a number of possible majors. This year students will leave the workshop with a packet of material to take to their adviser, who will help them figure out the next steps.
The content of the workshop is not unlike the individual sessions Balston often finds herself in. “I work with a lot of freshmen, and I see so many who want to go into health care,” she said. “They want to do that not because they’re passionate about science, but because they’re passionate about helping people. I try to get them to see that there are many ways to do that — both inside and outside the so-called ‘helping professions.'”
This year, Balston will be giving up the pre-nursing group as she moves to a three-days-a-week schedule. As part of her new focus on low scholarship students, she’s already teamed up with fellow adviser Chanira Reang Sperry to offer the Academic Success Workshop, which helps students evaluate and improve study habits and study skills.
“Students are such a surprise,” Balston said. “You start talking to students and all of a sudden you discover all these interesting things about them or you discover some challenges that some of them face. The trust they have in an adviser means a lot to me — that they’re willing to put themselves out and say what’s going on. Then to see it all work out for them and have them come in and say, I got into whatever program it was — that’s just an awful lot of fun.”
