A desire for a more personalized environment was one reason Veronica Viesca decided to take the director of academic advising position at University of Texas Permian Basin.
Viesca has been in education for about 15 years. She served at UT Tyler for 14 years and arrived in Odessa in April. Viesca is from Tatum in East Texas.
She earned a bachelor’s of business administration in management from UT Tyler, a master’s of science in human resource development from UT Tyler and is currently working on a doctorate in educational leadership in higher education from Stephen F. Austin University.
Viesca said UTPB appealed to her because it’s still relatively small and UT Tyler has grown exponentially.
“I can still get that homey (feeling) that I was losing at Tyler,” she said.
Viesca has a team of 15 advisors that she is responsible for. The help students one-on-one with doing everything from their schedule to getting registered for courses.
She had an equivalent position at UT Tyler for a while, but with all of the growth and expansion, there was some shifting around so they used a different model of advising where it was decentralized. At UTPB, it’s centralized.
Viesca said both of her parents were in education. Her mother was a teacher and her father sits on the school board. Her sister is an art educator in San Antonio.
“Education has always been in the family. But when I got to UT Tyler, I had a professor … and he said, Veronica, you just know everybody here in the undergraduate program. He said, have you ever thought about being an advisor? I had no clue what an advisor was. I ended up like doing some research and so he hired me. I didn’t really have to do anything, so I was a peer advisor for a while for the College of Business at UT Tyler,” Viesca said.
She also did accounts payable and accounts receivable for an oil and gas company in Kilgore part time.
After she earned her undergraduate degree they had a full-time position open up in the advising center. She applied for it and got it.
Viesca said she enjoys the connection with students that advising offers is very important and being able to help students navigate through their college life.
“This office does freshmen through sophomore, and then we just recently did a change with our advisors. So now we have embedded advisors in the colleges. We have other advisors positioned in their department areas here on campus to assist with our junior- and senior-level students. So there’s not that confusion, we have someone to send them to immediately once they leave the freshman and sophomore year because that’s where we’re seeing a lot of problems happen is students don’t know where to go. Sometimes faculty are so busy teaching classes that they don’t have an advisor they can see immediately, and we wanted to troubleshoot that and let them have someone that could see immediately,” Viesca said.
She said advising is much different than when she was in college.
“It was like hit and miss. They didn’t have the centralized areas to where students could go and see someone. What they had was … the faculty scattered throughout and you had a wander across campus and figure out who your advisor was …,” Viesca said.
People in the arts and sciences didn’t know who the advisor was for business school, for example.
“A lot has changed over the years in advising. We’ve also improved on this holistic approach to students, so not just concerned about their academics, but also with what are they involved in here? What are their goals and aspirations outside of the college and incorporating that into their passion and their talent and seeing the purpose that they have and what they will excel in later on and where they want their career trajectory to go,” she said.
Viesca said her main advice to students is to not give up.
“There’s a reason that they’re here and that reason is yet tenfold and to look forward to it. … That’s the big thing is not to give up because I know a lot of students here, especially in the West Texas area, tend to give up really easy, and I don’t want that for them. I want them to know that they belong here. There’s a place everywhere for people, and college is definitely for everyone, if you want it to be,” Viesca said.
Being a big Disney fan and having done an internship in Orlando, Viesca said she starts her day with a quote from a Disney executive, Lee Cockerell, who said, “It’s not magic that makes it work. It’s the work that we do that makes it magic. Those are things that I like to remember, and I like to try to bring the Disney magic to our students here at UTPB, or anywhere I’m at really, and let them know that they’re they’re meant to be here,” she said.
UTPB Dean of Student Success Micahel Frawley said Viesca is an important addition to the university.
“Her advising knowledge from her time at UT Tyler and her skills with our systems has allowed her to immediately innovate and streamline our policies and process, making the student experience so much better and getting them to graduation on a much clearer path,” Frawley said in an email.
