The Search for Advice

As a joint concentrator in Women, Gender, Sexuality (WGS) and government, the experience Christina Ahn ’05 had with advising offered glimpses of both sides of the remarkably broad Harvard advising spectrum.

Government, the second largest concentration, offered her advising in impersonal, one-shot deals, but with the promise of frequent availability.

“They don’t know your history, but there’s someone there,” Ahn says of the government tutorial office.

She says she expected a different style of advising from the smaller WGS department. “They would know my history more personally, have a file for me; they keep more personal contact with you, they’ll e-mail you about a deadline whereas I might not get that from gov. If I miss a deadline, I miss a deadline,” she says.

Differences abound in how individual departments advise their concentrators. From the personnel involved—everyone from graduate students, peer advisers, faculty within and without the department, and House tutors—to the various scheduling methods for advising—by appointment, walk-in, or published office hours—it is not always easy for concentrators to get the information they need to choose the best classes or stay on track with requirements.

In an October 2001 memo obtained by The Crimson, then-Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 appealed to University President Lawrence H. Summers to take note of poor advising in some academic departments and push for improvements.

Referring to an anecdote about one student who had slipped through the cracks of the government department’s advising mechanism, Lewis wrote, “This is a scandal. Harvard is cheating this student and stealing his money. If we can get the faculty—or, in the negligent departments, anyone at all—to pay more attention to students, the quality of the academic experience at Harvard will soar.”

Almost four years after Lewis wrote the memo, concentration advising information remains scattered, uneven, and often confusing.

PINPOINTING

THE PROBLEM

Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences David R. Pilbeam says the Curricular Review Committee on Advising and Counseling, which he chairs, looked at concentration websites and found only six that were “really good.”

“If I were a student, I would be completely baffled,” Pilbeam says. “We would like to see concentrations shepherded in a direction of greater clarity and less variability.”

“Whatever the requirements are, they should be spelled out in a way that’s clear, and ideally, spelled out in the same way across all concentrations,” he adds.

But the system now seems to hold a lot more variability and a lot less clarity. Undergraduate Program Administrator for the Department of English and American Literature and Language Inga Peterson says that as a new administrator, she herself has been frustrated and confused with the lack of centralized resources. When writing e-mails to concentrators, Peterson says she looks to the Freshman Yard Bulletin for information about events and other available sources of guidance on campus.

“It seems kind of silly for me that that’s where we’re cobbling info for concentrators about the University,” Peterson says. “What bothers me is that I’m working full time here and if I can’t find it, I wonder how much more difficult it is for the students themselves to find it.”

One part of the ongoing curricular review focuses on alleviating some of these problems directly with an Office of Advising, which would be charged with coordinating all aspects of the system.

Marquand Professor of English and American Literature and Language Daniel G. Donoghue, a member of the Committee on Advising and Counseling charged with exploring earlier recommendations, explains that the office is not centralizing advising, but rather coordinating it on a larger scale.

“The main duty of that office would be to coordinate, not to impose a kind of top-down model,” he says. “If advising is lagging behind in some department, the office can put some pressure on that department.”

As it comes into being, the office will be faced with highly differentiated advising structures, with some departments offering resources that lag behind in effectiveness and student satisfaction.

SIZE DOES MATTER

A linear regression completed recently by the Committee on Advising and Counseling showed a direct negative correlation between the quality of advising and the number of students in the concentration, says Deputy Dean of the College Patricia O’Brien, who aso sits on the committee on advising and counseling.

In his memo, Lewis cited data from 2001 senior surveys that showed overall satisfaction with departmental advising at an average of 3.19 on a 5-point scale across the College, but at only 2.57 in economics and 2.62 in government, the two largest concentrations.

In responses to three separate questions about whether advising meetings covered topics of academic interests, picking classes, and post-graduate or summer plans, students answering “yes” represented a low, and falling, percentage.

For example, 56 percent of the Class of 2001 responded “yes” that academic interests were covered in advising conversations, down from 59 percent in the Class of 1999 and 65 percent in the Class of 1997. The disparities between concentrations were also apparent empirically. In economics, the numbers were 28, 31, and 40 percent respectively, and in government they were 37, 41, and 52 percent respectively, according to the memo.

Large departments, and the systems they use to guide concentrators, seem to produce lower satisfaction ratings. And while almost half of all Harvard upperclassmen are in six of the 41 concentrations, faculty numbers are not proportionately distributed.

“There’s no way [faculty] can know 400 students as well as [they] know 100 students,” says social studies concentrator Shalini Ananthanarayanan ’05.

These differences are evident to students who have experienced both ends of the spectrum. “In philosophy it’s a much smaller concentration, so the head tutor could advise me,” says Joshua A. Barro ’05, a psychology concentrator who changed to philosophy—a department about five times smaller—for one semester. “In larger concentrations, advising is more bureaucratic and not personalized.”

Government concentrator Francisco Aguilar ’05 doesn’t think that concentration size should excuse departments from providing good advising. “What they really should have is a professor or graduate student who actually knows you,” Aguilar says. “The best thing it could do to strengthen the department is having a greater emphasis on advisers, especially advising by professors.”

And this contact has been shown to be beneficial to undergraduates’ academic experience. “We know that students who develop a relationship with a faculty adviser tend to be more satisfied than students who don’t,” O’Brien says.

It is no coincidence that the two largest concentrations have graduate student advisers staffing an advising office: the economics undergraduate advising office and the government tutorial office.

“We have so many undergraduates; if they assigned us all undergraduates it would just be a lot of people,” says Economics Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) Samuel B. Thompson.

Faced with the sheer volume of concentrators, the departments have looked to offices where they can offer mass advising efficiently. Students walk in and speak with graduate student staffers without an appointment, but often trade availability for long-term advising relationships.

Thompson says that graduate students can be better resources for students. “We’re happy if undergraduates talk to us, faculty, but a lot of times undergraduate questions are about classes, and for that, the graduate student advisers are much better,” he says.

Highlighting the problems faced by larger concentrations, Pilbeam notes that biological anthropology, one wing of the 120-concentrator Anthropology Department, manages with one head tutor. Based on those numbers, economics would need seven head tutors and government would need five. But they each have only one.

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

Concentration advising tends to occur primarily in two forms: providing answers to fact-based questions, usually about requirements, and more extensive advising about broad areas of interest or future plans.

But according to students in large departments, advising in those concentrations rarely extends beyond the most cursory issues.

“Advising is probably the worst aspect of the Gov department,” says Aguilar. “Whenever I’ve gone in [to the tutorial office], they either do not know or expect to sign a form, but having somebody who’s just kind of sitting there waiting to answer your questions is not advising.”

The nature of walk-in advising—you get your information and go—does not allow students to develop a close relationship with one adviser, says economics concentrator Andrei Pesic ’07.

And Pesic’s experience in the department seems far from unique.

“It’s a joke, it doesn’t exist, it’s stupid to say there’s concentration advising,” says economics concentrator Griffin E. Schroeder ’05.

Concentrators appreciate the office’s availability, but the experience seems incomplete. Pesic says while his basic needs for course advice are fulfilled, the advising does not extend much beyond that into his broader areas of interest.

“I think that’s sort of a missed opportunity that I think they could take advantage of, and would make the undergraduate experience better,” Pesic says.

These problems are often compounded by a lack of preparation and reaching out on the part of both students and professors.

“The under-utilized part of advising in the department is for students just to bang on their professor’s door,” Donoghue argues.

Absentee advisees can be a byproduct of the tension between the intellectual bigwigs Harvard attracts and the “admissions mistake” mentality among students.

And even after overcoming the intimidation factor, a professor may not be available.

“The faculty advisers are generally quite helpful when meeting with students, but sometimes some professors are hard to catch,” Assistant Head Tutor of Physics David Morin writes in an e-mail.

As such, students must often take the extra step to seek out guidance.

“If you really look for an adviser, if you’re proactive, make some effort, you can have a much better advising experience,” says economics concentrator Radu Tatucu ’05.

Some departments find that mentorship can be easier to facilitate, while finding advisers well-informed enough to guide students about requirements and classes is more difficult.

After conducting surveys of concentrators, Biochemical Sciences Head Tutor Richard M. Losick says he found that many felt they had good mentor advice, often from Harvard Medical School professors, but it was not easy enough to get technical advice.

“Fabulous scientists can give general advice about courses and careers, and lead tutorials,” Losick says. “But on the other side of the river, they are not always experts on ‘how do you meet the physical chemical requirement?’”

But students in other concentrations see the opposite problem, complaining about the abundance of technical advice and the lack of personalized advice.

After all, the most obvious purpose of advising is for students to collect study card signatures, and departments are sometimes quick to assume that advising revolves around the study card.

“I think they can benefit if there were more structured things throughout the semester,” biology concentrator Asya L. Agulnik ’05 says. “Right now, it’s centered around study cards.”

“It’s one thing to get your study card signed, it’s another thing to make sure you’re not missing a course that really is quite central to what you want to learn,” says Nancy L. Rosenblum, chair of the government department. “That’s the core of advising.”

The tutorial office “is not an atmosphere that’s conducive to actually sitting down and thinking about a long-term program,” she adds.

Most students want advising to lean more towards support. “Academic advising treats [advisers’] role as ‘okay, what classes should you be taking,’” says Barbara J. Eghan ’05, a history and literature concentrator, who dubs study card advising as a “kiss-off at the beginning of the semester.”

“I’m a human being before I’m a student, but there’s no recognition of that within any advising system here,” Eghan says.

FREEDOM TO CHOOSE

While departments gradually recognize that the mark of a well-advised concentrator is more complex than his or her Harvard diploma, the road to improvement is not so certain.

“Harvard does a very good job making ordinary things fail-safe,” Rosenblum says. “If you think that genuine academic advising is important, putting together a program that makes intellectual sense, making sure students don’t miss courses that they’re interested in...it’s difficult to make that fail-safe.”

Aiming to give students more options for effective advising, the English and American literature and language concentration recently implemented a system in which concentrators could call on one of five members of their “advising team.”

Peterson says she thought concentrators would relish having multiple points of advising, but instead, they gave mixed reviews. Some concentrators did not know who their adviser was, and others did not understand why they were not assigned one adviser like other concentrations, she says.

Communication is key for good advising, and nowhere is this more apparent than for joint concentrators.

Ann E. Helfman ’08, a joint concentrator in economics and government, says the person she spoke to in the eonomics department could only tell her about economics requirements and was clueless about declaring government as a secondary concentration, while the person she spoke to in the government department was more helpful. However, Helfman says both departments seemed isolated in relation to others.

“I don’t think there’s enough advising for people who want to do something different, like a joint concentration,” Helfman says.

Dialogue is also important when concentration advising can come from sources both in the Houses and in the departments.

Recalling times when advisers were not even aware of the Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) department, DUS Paul Stopforth says, “I do think that those people, students or tutors, who are responsible for advising in the Houses, they would need to know something about all these departments at Harvard.”

Before familiarizing themselves with other departments though, it is unclear whether advisers in the Houses are well-informed even about their own department, a result of inadequate coordination and a related reservation on the departments’ part.

Peterson says she has asked House Tutors to advise informally rather than formally because she cannot ensure that their information is consistent with the department’s.

“They’re underutilized,” she admits. “We haven’t yet figured out a way to have them to do formal advising yet, so right now we’re having them hold off.”

However, History Head Tutor Joyce Chaplin still believes in offering multiple options but also says students need to take advantage of them. “There could be some students who prefer faculty, some who don’t prefer faculty and use their House, some who use the tutorial office as the first line,” she suggests. “That may be fine that we offer several options and they’re not locked in. The burden is up to students to find what they like.”

—Staff writer Lulu Zhou can be reached at luluzhou@fas.harvard.edu.