Advisors and other named supporters
Many universities give every commencing student a named advisor. The value of that is mostly lost if the advisor hears about a problem weeks later, so First Six lets you attach that person to the student: when the student asks for help, their advisor is emailed at the same time as whoever normally covers the category.
This is optional. Plenty of institutions do not assign advisors, and nothing else in First Six depends on it.
What it changes, and what it does not
Changes: the named person gets the same notification your responders get, the moment a request comes in. They appear on the student's profile. They can narrow both the Students list and the help Inbox to Only my students.
Does not change: triage. The request still lands in your inbox, still shows in the open queue, still needs acknowledging and resolving by whoever works it. An advisor is an extra person told, not a redirection.
Does not change: who can see what. A supporter is emailed about their own student's request, and the email carries what the student wrote, so being named as somebody's advisor is a real disclosure. Adding one is recorded in the activity log with who did it.
Assigning them in bulk
Students → Assign advisors takes a pasted spreadsheet. One row per student.
| Column | Required | What it is |
|---|---|---|
advisor_email | Yes | The advisor's university address. |
student_email | One of these two | Which student. |
student_id_ext | One of these two | Your own student number, if you'd rather key on that. |
advisor_name | No | Only used when that person has no First Six account yet. |
relationship | No | advisor, accessibility, counsellor, learning, mentor or other. Defaults to advisor. |
ongoing | No | yes for someone who stays attached after first year. Blank means the assignment ends when the student finishes their six weeks. |
Pasting the same sheet again is safe: it updates rather than duplicating, so a corrected sheet can just be re-pasted. Nothing is removed by an import.
A 400-row paste with three problems in it gives you 397 assignments and three named errors, each with its spreadsheet line number.
They are told by email
When you assign someone, they get an email saying so. One student and it names them; a bulk paste and each advisor gets a single message telling them how many students they now have, not one message per student.
The email goes only to people who already have a First Six account. An advisor still waiting to sign in has nobody to email yet, so they are told when they arrive, by the students appearing in their list.
Sending the email is a separate step from making the assignment. If mail is delayed or fails, the assignment still stands, the students still appear, and the activity log still records who assigned whom.
Advisors who have no account yet
This is the normal case on day one, not an error: a university has far more advisors than it has First Six logins. The row is recorded against the student and flagged, and it connects itself the first time that person signs in with your university SSO. Nobody is emailed for them until then.
The import result lists the addresses it could not match, so a typo stands out from a department that simply has not signed in yet. First Six will not create a staff account from a spreadsheet, deliberately: these accounts receive students' own words about what is wrong, and a mistyped address should not be able to mint one.
One student at a time
Open the student from the Students page and use the Supporters section of their profile. That is the right path for a correction or a one-off. Ending an assignment is done here too, and it is deliberately not something an import can do: "this person is no longer your advisor" is a decision, with its own line in the activity log.
From your SIS
If you already send a nightly student feed, add advisor_email to each student
row (plus advisor_name and advisor_relationship if you have them) and this
happens on its own. It runs the same engine as the paste, so behaviour is
identical and nothing has to be re-learned when you switch.
When an assignment ends
By default when the student finishes their six weeks and moves into your continuing-student cohort. An advisor allocation belongs to the year it was made, and a first-year advisor is usually not the right person to email about a second-year problem.
Set ongoing to keep someone attached past that: an accessibility adviser or a
counsellor is normally ongoing, a first-year advisor normally is not.
Only my students
Both the Students list and the Inbox have an Only my students checkbox for anyone named as a supporter. It only ever narrows what you can already see: it cannot reveal a student who is outside your scope. Clear it to go back to the full list.
Common questions
Can a student have more than one? Yes. An advisor and an accessibility adviser and a counsellor can all be attached, and all are notified.
Does the advisor get crisis alerts? Crisis routes to your crisis responders and your crisis queue, exactly as it always has. That path is unchanged by any of this.
What if we get an allocation wrong? Re-paste the corrected sheet, or fix the one student from their profile. Both are recorded.
The fastest answer is usually one question away.