Editor’s note: The “Five minutes with” series focuses on a different person each time. The interviewer spends five minutes speaking with a person each week to learn about them, their specialty or something they are passionate about.

Christy Osborne is an academic adviser for the University College and the College of Arts and Sciences in the Wintrode Student Success Center. Osborne began working at SDSU in 1988 as an administration counselor. In 2011, she began working in the First Year Advising Center. She lives in Brookings with her husband, Curt Osborne, and her dog, Torii Hunter, named after the Minnesota Twins baseball player.

Q:  How does this school year compare with when you first began working at SDSU?

A: I don’t want to say it’s like night and day, but we didn’t really know what to expect that first year of advising. At first, we did a lot of group advising. We would have about five or six students at once to advise together. We just thought we had to do it that way to get all of our students in. Then, what we did that following year is we started advising earlier to get everybody in. We wanted more one-on-ones to have more of that personal relationship with students. We see everybody one-on-one now.

Q: When students schedule an advising meeting with you, what is it they want to work out or discuss with you?

A: It can be a variety of things. Typically it’s things like changing their major, maybe adding or changing a minor and other things. Sometimes, it’s more seasonal things like adding or dropping a class though. But, it’s not just about academics. It might be something like a roommate issue, a financial issue, could be that they’re homesick, we kind of cover a lot. Not every day is the same, which is kind of nice.

Q: What is it like to see students change year to year and watch them progress into graduating students? 

A: It’s just amazing. They come in as freshmen and they’re just getting the lay of the land and they really blossom into becoming a new kind of student. They take the tools and the knowledge from their first year and they use that in their sophomore, junior and senior years. It’s so much fun. That’s why I like going to the journalism banquet, because I get to see all the progress they’ve made so far.  I think we make a big difference in their success.

Q: What do you think is the most important thing a student can do in their first year at SDSU?

A: I think that for them to have a really good first year, they understand that they have an adviser and they know the resources available to them, like tutoring and supplemental instruction. I think that just access to advisers is really important for success.