Studienberatung online – eine hybride Beratungsform für Studierende und Studieninteressierte

"Student counseling works best from student to student." (Willige & Weber, 2004, S. 32). This quotation, which originated from a study of service and counseling offers for students, could well be the guiding theme of a new hybrid student counseling project at the Georg-Simon-Ohm University in Nuremberg. In a central student counseling portal, student peers and professionals work together to meet the (prospective) students’ diverse information and counseling needs. The following article portrays the conception and structure of the portal and presents preliminary results. This article draws on the reasons for and functions of student counseling in general to address (prospective) students’ information and counseling needs and their behavior in their search for information. It also considers the question hidden in the statement above of whether and why peer counseling is better than counseling done by professionally trained study advisors, i.e., the question of the significance and success of peer-counseling. Finally, it describes the way the student counseling portal works and reports on the experience with it to date.