Sarah Balcom, DVM, MS
Principal lecturer and Director of the Undergraduate Program
Department of Animal and Avian Sciences
University of Maryland
Advising & Mentoring
Advising:
I have two primary hats to wear in student advising in our department. The first is as a general advisor to admitted and current students and alumni in my role as the undergraduate director for the department. My second advising role is as the pre-veterinary advisor for both the department and for the campus. Below are descriptions of my work in both of these roles.
Mentorship:
I provide a substantial amount of teaching mentorship in the department of Animal and Avian Sciences. I mentor undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants in my courses each year and the undergraduate teaching assistants in several other courses through the UTA seminar I lead every semester. Additionally, my teaching mentorship extends to our faculty through one-on-one meetings, presentations I have given for the entire faculty, and my leadership of a bi-weekly in-house lecturers meeting. While I mostly work with new faculty members during their first couple of years at UMD, it is common for me to have more senior TTK faculty members come by my office to consult with me on issues they are encountering in the classroom.
A summary of my work as an advisor and teaching mentor is provided in the PDF file to the right.
The ANSC advising model
As part of my work as the undergraduate director in the department, I have worked extensively with my assistant director, Ms. Libby DuFour, and our Programs, Courses, and Curriculum committee to restructure our advising program for our majors. We recognized that students in their first two years were not getting consistent information about scheduling, graduation planning, internship and job opportunities associated with the department, and professional school counseling. We developed a model of small group advising run through the undergraduate office that ensures that all students receive timely, accurate, useful information for their stages in the curriculum, taking into account that some students come to us as transfer students from other universities, as UMD students who started their academic careers in other majors, and as Freshmen connection spring admission students. In this model, all first semester students in the program complete a "4 year planning" workshop with my assistant director in groups of 10-12 students. In their second semester, students have the option of doing an "options and opportunities in ANSC" group workshop, or coming to a pre-veterinary advising session with me. At this point, about 80% of our second semester class, or 60-70 students, are still on the pre-veterinary path. In the students' third semesters, they are matched with individual faculty advisors with whom they meet prior to course registration. They continue to meet with their faculty mentors every fall for the remainder of their time in our department. In the spring, students have the choice to attend one or more of a menu of group advising choices, including group pre-veterinary sessions with me on topics such as financial planning for veterinary school, non-clinical career options with a veterinary degree, and open Q&A sessions.
More informally, I also find that I have several students coming to me each semester seeking advice on careers, graduate school, balancing personal and academic life, and a host of other issues. I am happy to serve as a second advisor to these students as they need me.
Pre-veterinary advising
I am the pre-veterinary advisor for the department and the campus. Since coming to the University of Maryland, I have worked hard to increase the quality of our pre-veterianry advising. First, I prepared a comprehensive pre-veterinary advising guide which I freely share with any student interested in veterinary school at UMD. I have also had requests from faculty at 3 other universities and one high school for copies of my guide. I revised it in 2013 and 2016, and I am happy to share it with whomever might find it useful. Second, as part of our group advising model described above, I now give targeted advising to our pre-veterinary students so that they are better prepared to maximize their time, opportunities, and courses while in our department. I give three group advising sessions in the fall with about 15-20 students each, and 5-6 group sessions in the spring, again with 15-20 students each. Finally, I created a 200-level course called "Introduction to Veterinary Medical Science and Practice" which gives students authentic experience with veterinary problem-solving, evidenced-based medicine, and systems-based anatomy and physiology. According to my students, course has helped many of them figure out that they either were very interested in a career in veterinary medicine, or that another animal-related field was more appealing to them. I find both outcomes to be a success.
On an average year, between 12-13 of the 15 or so students we have apply to vet school are accepted to at least one school. One of them, a young man who took ANSC 250- Companion Animal Care and Management, and ANSC 275- Introduction to Veterinary Medical Science and Practice, wrote to me to tell me that he was accepted to veterinary school:
"Your Intro to Vet Med course was SO, SO, SO helpful that I would recommend making it a necessary course for the curriculum of Pre-vet professional. Please feel free to share this with curious students if you so desire. Thank you for everything you taught me. I am lucky to have had a professor as caring, skilled, knowledgeable, and in-touch as you. I hope to one day be as impressive. "
The students who remain on the pre-veterinary track, while assigned to individual advisors during the last two years, still come to me for help and advice on a frequent basis. Through formal advising, drop-in consults with the upperclassmen, and the courses I teach (and the veterinary course in particular), I really get to know and counsel the pre-veterinary students. And, fourth year, as they get their acceptances (many of them) and rejections (a few of them), I am there to share in those moments. I keep in touch with our Terps Veterinarians with a facebooks group that I started for them, now over 100 members strong, and through in-person contact when they come back to campus for a visit. From time to time a former student will call me for advice, which I am happy to give as I am able. Finally, I have had the pleasure to mentor two fourth year veterinary students with an interest in teaching on a three week external rotation; a third veterinary student is working to set up a similar such rotation for spring of 2020. I enjoy all of this work immensely, and I think it is an honor to help shape the next cohort of my future colleagues.
Mentoring
In many of my courses, I employ undergraduate and/or graduate students as teaching assistants. They are vital instructional helpers, facilitating course activities, providing grading support, and being additional resources for my students by holding office hours, review sessions, and one-on-one meetings. In return, I try to help them learn about the teaching process, from having them use "backwards design" to create and lead a class (undergraduates) or two (graduate students) to grading the learning assessments related to those classes. To support my TAs, we have weekly check in meetings as well as additional meetings to polish and practice the classes they lead. In the fall of 2015, I started offering a two-credit ANSC undergraduate teaching assistant seminar (ANSC 390, later changed to ANSC 379) to provide teaching support and development to all UTAs in our department. This seminar meets weekly to review current literature in college teaching and learning and to create projects and programs to support undergraduate learning in our department, such as creating a structured study group for our 300-level genetics course or developing "learning-to-learn" resources for our ANSC 101 students.
Additionally, I have mentored various student independent study projects related to individual student interests ranging from an animal shelter consulting project with a local feline rescue to pre-veterinary student projects looking at career opportunities to several teaching-learning projects for students interested in incorporating teaching into their future careers.
The faculty mentoring I provide unfolds in many ways. First, I am the mentor for our new teaching faculty as they come on board in the department. This job is not specified in my job description, but is one that I have grown into over the years as we have added four additional lecturers and several new tenure track faculty with teaching appointments. I meet with new faculty to talk about our curriculum and our curricular learning objectives, course design, student trends, and how to navigate our lecture, laboratory, and animal care spaces. I check in with them during their first semester teaching and provide support (as needed) and encouragement. This can range from a couple of meetings during a semester to the almost weekly emails I exchange with our newest faculty member, an adjunct instructor in genetics who is teaching a undergraduate course for the very first time. Second, I try to support all faculty teaching in our department. I have given presentations tailored to the interests and needs of our faculty, from an hour-long presentation on designing and using clicker questions in our lecture courses to short teaching updates tied in with faculty meeting presentations from our PCC. I maintain a lending library of teaching books and resources to share with my colleagues. On average, I have three to four meetings a semester with established faculty members in our department who come to me for advice about teaching or advising and many more drop-in conversations about the same. Finally, to foster mentoring and professional development for all of the lecturers in our department, I have been leading a bi-weekly lecturer's meeting since the fall of 2018. This has provided all of us with a wonderful forum to discuss issues, share what we have learned at other meetings, faculty learning groups, or workshops, and support each other. It has also been the primary means for us to mentor our newest faculty member who joined us in August of the same year. In response to the COVID19 pandemic and our need to teach remotely, I transformed our meetings into a faculty learning community on online education from April through August of 2020. Since then, our meetings have been less structured gatherings to provide mentorship, commiseration, and community for our new and established instructors as we continue to teach online. As we transition back to on-campus work, I will continue to lead this community.