To alleviate the long queues at the Dean's Office, Class Deans Lisa Thum and Teoby Gomez have created a student peer advising system in their offices.
Thum, the 1995 class dean, said the student advisers will make the deans more, rather than less, accessible.
"It will offer a supplement to us. [They] will be able to see students right away," Thum said.
On Monday, three seniors and two juniors will begin working on answering questions such as major and distributive requirements, leave term options and course selections from their classmates.
The peer advisers' office, located on the third floor of Parkhurst, will be open on weekdays from 11 a.m. to noon and from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
For many years, students have had to wait up to two weeks to see their class dean, according to Thum.
"On any given day, a student may not get to see his class dean. Now, if a student came in, they could go to a peer advisor," Gomez, the 1994 class dean, said.
"Many students have procedural questions that other people could answer. This leaves the Deans free for students with more pressing matters," Gomez said.
The advisers are not intended to help the first-year class because "the Freshman office doesn't have the same pressure as the upperclass deans," Freshmen Dean Peter Goldsmith said.
"In the freshman class, students get peer advised all the time," Goldsmith said.
"I'm hoping that a lot of sophomores, who have no advisers, will use the peer advising," Thum said.
Thum first proposed the idea for peer advisers in 1991 after seeing peer adviser programs at work in other colleges.
Thum and Gomez, who coordinated the program, hand-picked Amy Candido '94, Ed Dyer '94, Lisa Farrehi '94, Joe Santos '95 and Joe Dadzie '95 to undergo adviser training for the pilot project early last term.
"Since this is the first year, we were looking for students that we knew from various disciplines, personable people who were already knowledgeable about on-campus resources," Gomez said.
The advisers spent the Fall term training with Thum and Gomez, discussing every week specific problems that they would most likely have to deal with.
"We're mainly there to answer simple questions that take two seconds to answer- majors, classes, certain departments, distributive requirements," Santos said.
The advisers will not receive pay for their work.
"The budget in our office cannot maintain the program. We're hoping to have a class sponsor it sometime soon," Thum said.
