By Editorial Board
As the hustle and bustle of early registration winds to a close, students and advisers will likely breathe a sigh of relief as faculty office hours return to normal and students can once again avoid Waldschmidt Hall and online registration.
But the shadow of class registration is one that ultimately follows every student until commencement. For some students, the registration process could bear from much-needed improvement.
In light of these challenges, UP's schools should be commended for continuing to take steps to improve their advising system.
Compliments go out to the Pamplin School of Business for centralizing their scheduling process to alleviate advisers to better prepare students for their profession.
Plans by the College of Arts and Sciences to streamline the distribution of information will ideally help to simplify the process and increase the value of the adviser as a mentor.
Faculty advisers, in business and other fields, have a wealth of information that students would do well to take advantage of.
Beyond help at registration time, by sheer virtue of their greater experience and age, advisers can provide help with educational and professional goals.
Come time to apply for graduate school or that sweet entry-level job, it's nice to have someone in your corner who can write a letter of recommendation.
The strategy of freeing up advisers into a more mentor-like role is commendable and makes for a better use of faculty resources.
Every student has heard grumblings in the halls of their dorms come scheduling time.
In an ideal world, all students in every major would have a helpful faculty adviser and the luxury of someone who can help them navigate the sometimes byzantine scheduling process.
We concede, for instance, that the sheer number of CAS majors inhibits the school from mimicking plans for more centralized scheduling used by other colleges at the university.
CAS, we believe, with it's large number of majors and students, needs the most help in this respect.
Again, since it would be impratical to have a scheduling and advising guru - we'd pity the poor person charged with scheduling for all of CAS - the knowlege should be better spread among professors.
Plans to create an "advising consortium" for CAS advisors to ask questions and share advice could be step in the right direction, if it was melded with the similarily proposed registration FAQ Web page.
The specialized schools of nursing, engineering and even education will likely always have an inherent advantage in centralizing student registration over the more general CAS. It's for this very reason that if there will never be a central source for CAS majors, the school needs to disseminate the knowledge around more completely.
Although faculty mentorship of students is an integral part of college development, students need more than a buddy; they need someone to help them with credits.
The advising system may never be "perfect," but that shouldn't stop us from trying.
