By Andy Matarrese
Senior Anne Carey was undeclared when she came to UP. She ended up picking a major, almost arbitrarily, just to get another adviser.
"He was a nice guy, but he had no idea how to help me," she said.
She was unable to get the second major she wanted because she was never told her AP credits could transfer.
Carey ended up taking Statistics, US History and Introduction to Literature - two of those being her least favorite classes here and all three being classes she didn't really need.
"By the time I figured it out, I didn't have time to take all the needed classes," she said.
Although Carey has found a major she enjoys - Spanish with minors in sociology and environmental science - and an adviser she likes, she said it was a bit of too little, too late.
"I feel like none of the advisers have had more of an understanding of the rules and the Bulletin than I could have myself," she said.
She recalled her advisers always calling other offices in the College of Arts and Sciences, unsure about different requirements.
Carey is not alone in having problems with the advising system.
According to a report from the National Survey of Student Engagement released earlier this month, one in three college seniors rated the quality of academic advising as fair or poor.
Advising Consortium
As part of the University's response to the recommendations made by the Task Force on Retention, UP has created an "advising consortium" where program counselors and others involved in the advising process can trade ideas with the hopes of improving the process.
Instances like Carey's are rare, either in the College of Arts and Sciences or in other colleges at the university, according to theology professor and Associate Dean of Students for CAS Matthew Baasten.
Baasten, newly appointed as associate dean for students, has plans to change the advising process to make it more fruitful, both in practical scheduling terms and in terms of guiding students through their time at UP.
"What we think is more important is the mentoring," he said.
Baasten explained that the desire for an advising approach that would help map professional and educational goals, for all students, came down from the president and the provost.
"Faculty members are much more comfortable mentoring than scheduling," Baasten said. "We love talking about academic ideas, your journey, where you want to end up, what your goals are."
Letting advisers play to their strengths and assist students with less tangible things than scheduling classes creates a more valuable relationship, according to Baasten.
"Without a relationship, advising doesn't work on any level, scheduling or mentoring," he said.
By next semester, Baasten hopes to set up a Web site with centralized scheduling and degree progress information along with frequently asked questions about transfer credits, studying abroad and faculty contacts.
The site, designed for students and advisers, will be more user-friendly than leafing through the Bulletin. To assist in advising, faculty will begin mentor training next semester.
Baasten also hopes that the same kind of registration session hosted by CAS and its student advisory committee on Nov. 5 for freshmen will be repeated yearly.
He explained that by changing the dynamic of the advising process, students will not only have better guidance with educational and professional development - possibly with letters of recommendation, meetings with alumni of similar majors or grad school advice - but that being better acquainted with each other will also help ensure against any scheduling mistakes.
Professional development
The Pamplin School of Business is also changing the way it advises, according to Program Coordinator Gwynn Klobes and Program Assistant Erica Jones.
While faculty advisers have traditionally helped students with scheduling, Klobes and Jones are now shouldering more of that responsibility and meeting with students to make sure they are on track.
Advisers now help students prepare for the professional world.
"This system is a much better use of people's strengths," Klobes said.
With the help of their advisers, she said, students are encouraged to think about what they want to do in the business world much earlier, build resumes and look for jobs and internships.
She said advisers don't need to constantly call the dean's office and wrestle with the constantly-changing bulletins for each class, she said.
"They're able to just focus on what they were talking about with the student," Jones said.
So far, Klobes and Jones have heard mostly positive feedback from students and faculty, but they invite members of the Business School to share their opinions on the new system.
Different processes
Mix-ups like what happened to Carey and other confusion can and still do arise.
Kitty Harmon, the engineering program counselor, is the one engineering majors and professors come to when it does.
"I'm the one that fixes all the problems," she said.
The advising process in the School of Engineering is similar to CAS, where students meet with their faculty adviser to plan scheduling.
The process is usually straightforward due to the systematic nature of engineering degrees.
In Harmon's experience advising students, most of the problems come from online registration programs that can't detect the nuances of every student's educational needs.
Other times, students might have to spend more time in school because they went off track, either by withdrawing from a class or by lightening their load to deal with challenging coursework.
"Sometimes we have to be a little creative when we have to work things like that out," she said.
Elisa Majors, nursing program counselor, explained the situation was similar for nursing students.
"In nursing, there is not much room for deviation from our curriculum, which means there are few surprises regarding course registration," she said in an e-mail.
For education majors, Academic Program Counselor Maribeth McGowan is the go-to person for shuffling classes beyond advisers.
McGowan explained that for education majors, students must schedule with the required number field experience hours and individual program requirements in mind.
She said that it is easier for the professional to have centralized scheduling offices and counselors because they have fewer students and majors than CAS has.
Scheduling woes
English Professor Lars Larson was an adviser at UCLA, where the job was distinct from professorships. As an adviser, Larson's primary responsibility was to understand class scheduling and help students with it.
He appreciates the system UP has in place, saying it works to a professor's advantage to learn how different parts of the university work through different students' class requirements.
"At UCLA, professors had no idea what students were required to do," he said.
As it stands, though, he believes CAS needs a better system and more training for professors.
"We get a single, semesterly e-mail from the advising department which is helpful but not comprehensive," he said.
He added that he suspects the dean's office is swamped this time of year, and that he felt embarrassed calling them with so many questions when he first came to UP.
"Professors can be dummies," he said.
Larson himself once missed a problem with a student's progress, not realizing she was a credit shy of what she needed. The student ended up taking summer classes to get her diploma.
Baasten said he hopes the changes he wants to implement will prevent such setbacks, but adds it is still the student's responsibility to keep things on track.
"Errors are very, very few," he said, explaining they mostly arise in the "key numbers," meaning the 120 total hours and 48 upper-division hours required to graduate. T he first step is asking for help before it's too late.
"If you don't meet with your adviser, we can't tell you what to do," he said, adding that applies to all students in all majors.
Can scheduling be 'fixed?'
Senior Julie Strang transferred to UP from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania to major in biology and minor in psychology.
Because some credits transferred differently, Strang will have to take more classes than she thought she would for her last semester.
She transferred late in her senior year at Lafayette, and she thinks rushing what seemed to her like a usually long and involved process caused some things about her transcripts to be overlooked. Classes at Lafayette are numbered and credited differently than at UP.
"I don't think most people transfer their senior year in college," she said, "so that makes things more confusing."
However her credits end up transferring, she's sure scheduling classes and getting credits in line isn't a problem unique to UP.
"I've never been to a school that has a smooth registration process. People always have qualms about it," she said. "It's always going to be a flawed system."
