Entering Academic Advising Theorizing Professional Socialization

Abstract

Primary-role academic advisors come to the field from a wide variety of social, academic, and vocational backgrounds.  There are likely a wide variety of ways in which these advisors are socialized for the work of academic advising and in the larger community of practice of advising.  However, advisors’ professional identity development is under-studied, and this lack of understanding is an impediment to the emergence of advising as a profession. This article presents findings on professional socialization from a larger collaborative autoethnographic study of advisor professional identity. We present a collaborative analysis of our reflections on becoming primary-role advisors which includes nine interconnecting themes in an emerging substantive theory of advisor professional socialization. Though it is not generalizable, our model is a proposal on which future research can build.