This year, academic counseling will be a one-stop shop for St. Thomas business majors.

Since 2006, the Opus College of Business has had a separate academic counseling office in McNeely Hall for business majors as a “dual advising system.” The intent was to give students quality service by having a business academic counselor who helped map out four-year course plans and a faculty adviser who was more of a career coach.

But as of this past July, that office no longer exists, and all business majors will now be receiving academic counseling through Academic Counseling & Support in the Murray-Herrick Campus Center.

Betsy Lofgren was one of the four business counselors who worked in McNeely, and had been there since the opening of the separate counseling office in 2006. Now, she works in Academic Counseling & Support as a general academic counselor.

“Our jobs were eliminated, so (St. Thomas was) planning for people being gone and not having to pay for them,” Lofgren said. “However, academic counseling realized all these business students who had been going to us would now need to be going here (Academic Counseling & Support), so they absorbed half of us to be able to work with business majors.”

The change comes in the wake of St. Thomas’ rebranding last spring, which led to reorganization in some departments on campus. For Georgia Fisher, assistant dean of Undergraduate Programs in the Opus College of Business, it was a change that didn’t come without some disappointment.

“Our program counselors … were able to work with the same students for four years and establish a strong working relationship with the student, and often with brothers and sisters of those students,” Fisher said in an email. “We had seen deficiencies in the program 10-plus years ago and in instituting the (separate business counseling program), we were able to turn those deficiencies into a strength.”

That’s a sentiment echoed by senior Andrea Rodriguez, who, as a human resources major, had been working with the former business counseling office since she was a first-year student.

“I liked it, I thought it was a really good system, it was really easy to make an appointment with them and see them and have all my questions answered,” she said. “It was really convenient to just walk over there, see my adviser, and stop in and say hi.”

Despite that, however, Rodriguez thinks that the merging of the two offices will work just as well.

“Pooling everyone together and having one central place does make sense because for those who do change majors, like if they were in biology and then decided to do accounting, they don’t have to go and learn a whole new system. It’s all based in the same place now,” she said.

“The entire university is working their way through this,” Fisher said. “It’s a work in progress this year.”

Danielle Wong can be reached at wong0031@stthomas.edu.