It was freshman week, and, like most of my classmates, I was wandering around Tuck Drive amidst the Dartmouth Dining Services' barbecue in search of my faculty adviser. Unable to find him, I stumbled upon one of his colleagues, who informed me that he was out of the country and was unsure when he'd return. I figured that this minor setback was just a small mishap which probably didn't happen very often. I didn't complain. I just waited for my advisor to blitz me. And he didn't. So I blitzed him.On the day of our appointment, I waited 30 minutes past our appointment time until he showed up and when we finally began to discuss class choices, he not once mentioned my language requirement which I hadn't started to fulfill. Needless to say, this wasn't a stellar first college advising experience, but it didn't occur to me that my peers might have also had similar experiences.
When I attended my first Student Assembly Academic Affairs meeting two weeks later, a possible project topic was to research Dartmouth's advising system. Having had a negative experience myself, I agreed to take on the task, and since then, I've been learning a lot about Dartmouth's academic advising. After editing a guide to advising at Dartmouth, I know how easily students can fall through the cracks in Dartmouth's academic advising programs. I quickly learned that, as a sophomore, any help I might need would have to be a result of my own initiative. Although the assistance I needed was available, how was I, a first-week freshman, supposed to know how to go about finding the answers to all of my questions? And, although the first-year advising program looks excellent on paper, I witnessed that many of my friends never met with their advisers after the initial meeting and PIN number distribution.
Under the present guidelines, all faculty are supposed to serve as freshman advisors if they are in residence in the fall. Although the freshman office tries to accommodate people with advisers who will be in residence for both fall and winter, the Dartmouth Plan makes this impossible. For many first-year students, as soon as they try to get to know their adviser, he or she is gone and the student is left to try and foster a new relationship with someone else.
Even more upsetting: some faculty advisors haven't received the proper training to be advisers. A training session is held in the fall of each year to train first-year advisers and retrain past faculty advisers. However, many faculty members choose not to attend! The training session is a wonderful resource, but the lack of attendance illustrates that many professors simply don't want to advise.
After having expressed some of my grievances to faculty members who do care about advising, they tell me that freshman don't want advising. My response to this is that many first year students might be intimidated by their adviser and, in the beginning, they might not realize how cool it is to have someone who knows what they're doing (other than their Undergraduate Advisor) looking out for them.
It is equally important to have good relationships with a faculty member during the sophomore year, especially pre-major. First-year advisers are not required to become a student's second-year adviser (although this was attempted five or six years ago). Second-year students are, therefore, without advisers when they declare a major. Considering the fact that choosing a major is very important to one's Dartmouth experience, this is a time where advising is crucial.
When surveying 1,000 students about advising last year, I found a general trend that people were unsatisfied with their first-year advising experiences and were confused as to why they were without an adviser as a sophomore. Juniors and seniors commented that they might have chosen different course or extracurricular activity paths if the advising they had received was better.
Faculty are frustrated as well. Why should faculty be forced to be advisers if they make it clear that advising, for them, is not a priority? An abundance of poor advisers isn't nearly as helpful to students as a smaller group ofgood, accessible ones would be.
I know, from discussions with students at other schools and from a plethora of appointments with administrators and faculty, that there is no perfect advising system. I know that the D-Plan makes continuity tough to achieve for students and advisors.And I'm not saying that every first-year advisor is abominable, because that is not the case.But many Dartmouth students are unhappy; many faculty members are frustrated -- it's time that we take some action and review a system that has been a disappointment at both ends.I think it is time that a committee comprised of faculty, students and administrators evaluate our advising system's advantages and faults, research advising programs at other institutions and then produce recommendations for Dartmouth.
