Upperclass Guidance

Last Wednesday, the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) approved a measure that will help first-years pick their concentrations by creating lists of upper-class advisers. Each academic department’s head tutor will create a list of upper-class students, including information about their academic, extracurricular and career interests. By this spring, the lists will be available online for first-years to seek and find student advisors.

This plan, authored by Rohit Chopra ’04, Christopher M. Hill ’05 and Omolola Kassim ’04, is a good step toward improving first-year advising and helping first-years make difficult decisions about their concentrations. Fortunately, the major issues that caused the proposal to be held up last year—remuneration and the selection process for the upper-class advisors—have been resolved to both sides’ satisfaction.

These upper-class students will not be paid, which makes sense; though their advice is valuable, the time commitment of explaining one’s personal experience to a first-year is negligible. As for choosing the advisors, departments’ head tutors should make sure to recruit students who have different areas of interest, and who also have a wide range of experienes in the department. If all the upper-class students present sugar-coated views of their departments rather than honest appraisals, the program will do little to help first-years make informed choices.

To that end, all undergraduates who work formally with first-years—like prefects—should not be forced to restrict themselves to providing “information,” as opposed to actual advice. The College and the departments must take this leash off of upper-class students. The rule is largely meaningless, but its mere existence might inhibit upper-class students from expressing their opinions candidly. Additionally, since first-years can conceivably compare the advice of several undergraduates with different interests, a compilation of honest advice will better help first-years than any guarded “information.” In the absence of this rule, upper-class students will never take the place of proctors or other first-year academic advisors—but the students will be able to supplement their perspectives and offer constructive ideas of their own.

But helping first-years choose the right area of study must not take the place of meaningful advising once they join a department.

Among departments, a key problem with advising is consistency; some students receive high quality, committed faculty members while others receive graduate students who finish their career at Harvard before their advisees do—forcing undergraduates to get a new advisor or to wander without guidance. Other students are nominally assigned an advisor who is responsible for all the concentrators in the House—but as long as someone signs the study cards, students need not even meet their “advisor.”

All departments should assign each incoming sophomore an individual advisor—not someone who just lives in the House, but a faculty member or graduate student who is intending to be at Harvard for the next three years, and who shares an academic or career interest with the student beyond merely the concentration. These academic advisors should be required to meet with the advisees at least once a year; they should be the people signing students’ study cards, and at the same time discussing long-term plans to help students take advantage of the best options concentrations have to offer.

With any luck, success under this new student-advising program will improve first-year academic decisions and motivate each department to improve its own advising program. The College must pursue both first-year and upper-class advising vigorously; high quality advising can and should be a permanent component of every student’s academic career.