Freshmen got a dose of sage advice about classes two days before they even stepped foot in their faculty advisers' offices, when the Student Assembly launched its Peer Academic Advising program Saturday.
The meetings were not mandatory for the freshmen, but approximately 80 to 90 percent of freshman attended, said Julia Hildreth '05, Student Assembly President and initiator of the program.
Peer academic advisers prepared freshmen for their faculty adviser meetings, assisted them in making schedule decisions and assuaged other academic concerns last Saturday.
The 164 upperclassman advisers were broken down into groups of three so that one in each group specialized in the social sciences, math and sciences and arts and humanities, respectively. The teams counseled two groups of 10 freshmen in one-hour sessions. Most groups divided their sessions into a general information forum and individual help.
In the existing academic advising system, freshmen are assigned to faculty members with whom they meet at the beginning of the term to discuss their fall schedules and other pertinent academic decisions. The system has met with persistent criticism from freshmen each year who complain their needs aren't met.
To fill in gaps left by the existing system, Hildreth decided to initiate the peer advising program.
Freshmen said peer advisors helped them grasp some of the nuances of D-plans, FSPs, requirements and other Dartmouth idiosyncrasies.
"The session helped me find out about options for my distributive requirements that I wouldn't have known about," Nicole Lopez '08 said.
Laura Plummer '08 said that the one-on-one nature of the sessions achieved this purpose. The peer advisers "helped us pick out individual classes, so my meeting only took 10 minutes," she said.
Some freshmen, however, came away from their peer adviser sessions with more irritation than direction.
"They want to be helpful, so they say more things than are necessary to blow things out of proportion," Cullen Roberts '08 said. For instance, "they make difficult classes seem impossible," he said.
While the Assembly funded and sponsored the $10,000 project, Hildreth stressed that this is only a temporary solution to the need for academic advising reform.
"In terms of resources and people, it's a lot of pressure on [the Assembly], so we really need some help from the College to make it more successful next year," Hildreth said.
Hildreth also stressed that an objective of the program is to facilitate more accessible student-faculty relationships and even recurring student-faculty meetings.
In a similar vein, the College has also created the position of a dean of pre-major advising, filled by Cecilia Gaposchkin, to provide further academic advising support.
Last spring, the Assembly recruited upperclassmen to participate in the program, which required that students return to campus early for a two-day-long training session full of speeches from deans and campus administrators. The Assembly also treated upperclassmen to a dinner catered by the Hanover Inn.
Although some students found training boring or could not attend because it conflicted with Rosh Hashanah services, response from upperclassman participants in the program was largely positive.
"The freshmen took a real interest in looking down the road and planning out the first of their four years at Dartmouth, which is something I wish I had done," adviser Mitch Pet '07 said.
