Academic coaching has been emphasized in Korean universities as an effective measure to assist students' academic achievement and success. To better assess the needs of the students, the current study investigated academic coaching intake session reports archived at a Korean university from January 2017 to August 2021 and examined students' descriptions of their academic concerns and barriers. The intake session reports were categorized according to (1) students' affiliated department tracks, namely Humanities and Social Science (HSS) and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) tracks, and (2) the time the coaching sessions took place, i.e., before and after the outbreak of COVID-19. Text mining analysis was conducted to calculate the frequency of keywords, their degree of centrality, and the frequency of bigrams, or the sets of two adjacent words, for each category. Wordclouds and word networks were also visualized. The results indicated that the word study was dominant in both categories, reflecting the education culture in Korea. Similarities and differences between the two categories were also reported. Based on the results, practical implications for academic coaches, educators, and university administrators were proposed, and limitations were discussed.
Keywords: academic coaching; intake session; text mining; university student.