The Strategic Guide to Shaping Your Student Affairs Career

“From the point of view of someone in his first year in Student Affairs, Sonja’s book provides honest guidance about what it means to be a new professional. Sonja presents theory and practical insight on how you can create and take advantages of opportunities that will enhance your career, and addresses many of the challenging experiences you will face when starting out. Reading this manuscript while I transitioned into a full-time position was extremely fortuitous.”

Thomas Harwell, Resident Director at Boston College

"Ardoin and her coauthors invite readers into a learning partnership to navigate becoming a student affairs educator. [Her] emphasis on bringing one’s personal authority to career planning is a central theme of the book. Ardoin advocates professionals taking responsibility for their own growth and development and approaching their careers with intentionality. To assist readers in taking up the invitation, she provides a concrete career strategy that includes five components: lifelong learning, extending your experiences, planning for professional development, networking and connecting, and self-reflection. The book explicitly addresses balancing intentionality and flexibility in advocating these strategies as processes for continued growth. Ardoin emphasizes personal authority in her focus on developing one’s individual style for how to plan, strategize, network, and reflect. She recognizes that career planning is not a one-size-fits-all process and provides good questions, worksheets, and resources throughout to help focus self-reflection, assessment and personal stock-taking.

Ardoin and her colleagues offer good company for readers in various stages of student affairs careers to recompose meaningful work and adult lives."

Marcia B. Baxter Magolda

"As a professor in a higher education program I seek activities and resources that can bookend a student’s experience in our program. I have finally found the book that will both stimulate discussion among new professionals in their first class and foster rich dialogue in their last class. Actually reading the book twice affords students the opportunity to consider the core elements of a career strategy as discussed in this text: lifelong learning, extending your experiences, planning for professional development, networking/connecting, and self-reflection. The Strategic Guide to Shaping Your Student Affairs Career will be a must read for our students"

Audrey J. Jaeger, Professor, Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis, Co-Executive Director, National Initiative for Leadership & Institutional Effectiveness

North Carolina State University

"The Strategic Guide to Shaping Your Student Affairs Career is a one of a kind resource for student affairs administrators in any stage of their career. The book is well organized around five key elements of career strategy that helpfully prompt readers to not only focus and reflect on critical stages in their career development and advancement, but also on their personal motivations and goals. This is enhanced by the inclusion of voices of current administrators who share their stories and insights to illustrate the book’s message.”

Ashley Tull, Director of Assessment and Strategic Initiatives, Division of Student Affairs

Southern Methodist University

"This book fills a huge hole in the field of student affairs—namely, helping graduate students and new professionals chart a path for their career. The writing is crisp and clean, and very easy to read. By taking a strategic approach to identifying career goals and planning a deliberate approach to one’s own professional development, Dr. Ardoin’s book is a clear and useful guide to the profession. It will be very useful in teaching graduate students how to think about the future, but is also useful as a guide for the new professional in their first or second job who is thinking, 'What is next and how do I get there?!' A great contribution by Ardoin and her many contemporaries who share their own stories of success."

Robert A. Schwartz, Professor of Higher Education and Chair, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

Florida State University