Senior Orientation

Each year, the senior tutors' offices, Mr. Crooks' Dunster Street auctioneers, and a scattered army of pre-professional counselors (resident House pre-medical advisors et. al.) do a fine job of placing, selling, and guiding the bulk of the senior class. But prospective graduate students in the arts with no foreign fellowship ambitions get little in the way of guidance gladhanding. It is difficult, in the context of the College's present placement system, to find someone who can answer a question like "to which schools do I apply if I want to study the history and culture of modern Germany?"

Too many "arts" seniors contemplating graduate study feel that Harvard GSAS is the only worthy graduate school in the country, and one probable factor in creating this feeling is their lack of familiarity with the graduate departments of other universities. This overblown attraction toward GSAS can result in last-ditch "Where shall I apply?" queries, directed very often to people who know little more about American graduate schools than the student. Or it can end in abandonment of graduate study plans.

The large Placement Office-type forum provides neither an appropriate opportunity to ask specific questions about graduate departments, nor a felicitous occasion to have them answered.

Seniors can certainly consult their tutors, where the tutor's field of study and knowledge of other schools' departments makes such consultation appropriate. Yet it would seem quite desirable for the departments to organize such consultations and perhaps to appoint a few knowledgeable members of the Faculty to carry them on in each field. These Faculty members would not be doing distasteful administrative and "guidance placement" work, but rather would be engaged in presumably interesting "shop talk" with students who are potential scholars in their own field.

Certainly, the College should be as solicitous--or, more correctly, as effective--in providing information to the scholars and teachers that it will need as it is in dispensing job leads to next year's Raytheon engineers and application hints to future Johns Hopkins graduates