Mission Statement for Virtually Advising, Inc.
(last edited June 27, 2001)

The primary mission of Virtually Advising is to assist college students, college hopefuls and those close to them with their academic questions and/or concerns. Virtually Advising seeks to achieve this goal by:

• Establishing an international community of professors, professionals and students dedicated to offering top-notch academic advice.
• Producing a Web site, virtuallyadvising.com, where students and hopefuls can receive free academic counseling.
• Publishing a regular question-and-answer column for use on print and online media, as well as high-quality, academically oriented content written by in-house staff and reliable third parties.
• Promoting these services directly to students, universities and college-related media.

Academic counseling services are an invaluable resource in the United States. It is no secret that the number of students attending institutions of higher education increases each year; studies estimate that the number of college students will increase by 20 percent or more over the next decade. As this number steadily rises, so does the strain on the hard-working, dedicated advisers and counselors in our nation's colleges.

In addition, many students are often too shy to seek help from a professional counselor or feel intimidated by the stature of their own advisers. They may instead seek help from friends or family members with whom they are more comfortable sharing their problems, often at the sacrifice of higher-quality assistance their college or university could provide.

Furthermore, as a result of our increasingly interconnected, Web-ready world, there has been a massive influx of non-traditional, international and distance-learning students hoping to study at U.S. colleges. These students often exist outside the scope of high-school and college academic counseling services, and are unable to easily obtain the counseling they need.

As a result of these factors, one-on-one academic counseling has become more precious in an educational system that constantly strives to help its students succeed as individuals. Virtually Advising seeks to use its own resources to stem that tide, by offering free counseling and content to college students and college hopefuls around the world. This type of personalized online service offers unique benefits that counseling services are often unable to provide, namely:

• The convenience of the Internet, a medium utilized more by college students than any other demographic on the planet.
• Access to our international community of students, professors and professionals; we will match an advisee's specific questions with a counselor uniquely qualified to address them.
• Guaranteed anonymity for the advisee.
• Individualized attention promptly and on demand.

Our service is intended for use as a supplement to professional counseling and academic services provided by individual schools, not as a replacement. It is our hope, however, that each person we advise will lighten the workload for individual colleges' academic services. In doing so we will help ensure that a new generation of students is as prepared as possible for the challenges that face it in college and beyond.