Money Can’t Buy You Love

Between the Courses of Instruction catalogue, CUE guide and Handbook for Students, Harvard freshmen get bombarded with an intimidating 2,590 pages of academic jargon before they even start their classes. But this past year, for the first time, they had some hired help in navigating the mess: their Peer Advising Fellows (PAFs).

The Peer Advising Fellows Program, designed to replace the Prefect Program, specifically trains the PAFs to give academic advice as well as social support. It attempts to facilitate strong relationships between freshmen and upperclassmen, allowing the freshmen to seek help from those close to them in age and experience, with the upperclassmen reaping the rewards of their efforts through a monetary stipend.

“It’s all about casual advising and forging friendships,” PAF Matthew L. Sundquist ’09 says. But herein lies the inherent problem.

The informal approach to advising proposed by the administration is something rather inviting to students, and yet the idea of stipends funding these “peer” relationships harkens towards a tête-à-tête that is more murky than it is efficient. The boundaries between adviser and advisee are a vague distinction that is thoroughly conflated in the Peer Advising program. But amidst all the confusion about who’s actually in charge, the original task at hand has suddenly been masked—what is to be done with this overwhelmed Harvard neophyte? And will his dicey peer have the answers to all of his questions?

FRIEND OR FOE

“It’s a fine line between strict friend or a strict adviser,” Sundquist says, especially given the position in which the PAFs are placed.

The Peer Advising program designates that its fellows spend about 40 hours per semester in their roles, in return for the $500 stipend they receive at the beginning of each semester. This addendum to the Prefect Program shows that the University is willing to put its money where its mouth is, but the question that then arises is just how appropriate a “casual” approach to advising is.

“I definitely see it as an issue of people just not realizing that it’s a job,” PAF Mariah F. Peebles ’09 says. “I hate calling it a job…a responsibility.”

She does think, however, that as the training and application process becomes more difficult the program will eventually become more self-selecting as students realize the commitment difference from the prefect program.

“I think that the expected investment and involvement is a lot higher in the PAF system and a lot more explicit,” PAF and former prefect Nicole T. Townsend ’07 says. “Under the prefect system it was just showing up to study breaks”— more cookies and candy than hard-edged academic advice.

The truth is that the responsibility implicitly associated with academic advising is enormous. There is no comp process that allows for slow learning through mistakes and success. The seemingly unimportant choices these freshmen make could eventually be as far reaching as determining a career on Capitol Hill or one distributing political flyers on Beacon Hill—choices that weigh heavily on the advice and support of their advisers.



BIG BROTHER, BIG SISTER

According to the creators of the Peer Advising program, it was hardly the intention to endow these fellows with so much responsibility.

“A Fellow is intended to be a big brother or big sister, somebody to help you, so there’s really no ‘authority’ involved,” Associate Dean of Advising Programs Monique Rinere says.

Then what exactly was the point of updating the old system of peer-to-peer mentoring, the Prefect program?

Looking back on her experiences as a prefect, former UC vice president Annie R. Riley ’07 says that the downfall to the program was the lack of authority they were given when it came to the most pressing arena of advice: academics.

“I think that the biggest problem was that if freshmen would ask me about academics, the trained answer was that I wasn’t ‘trained’ to answer that,” Riley says.

But with additional training sessions and a monetary compensation, the developers of the Advising program hoped to amend this problem of authority, rendering its PAFs with something closer to a familial bond—a certain accountability that at the end of the day allows the advisees to be reassured that someone is assigned to look after them.

“I think one of the real benefits of compensating the Fellows, that is, recognizing the responsibility of the Fellows, is that it allows the freshmen to not feel that they’re being a burden,” advising program manager Brooks Lambert-Sluder ‘05 says. “Freshmen can see that this is the Fellows’ job and they don’t feel bad when they IM their Fellow at 10 PM asking how to get to a certain class tomorrow.”

“It’s a little easier to approach someone,” he adds. “It’s easier for freshmen to feel that they’re not wasting their Fellow’s time if they’re getting paid and this is their job.”

is it really worth the $?

Even though the administration has gone to lengths to make PAF-to-freshman contact easier, this does not necessarily imply that the program has become a central part to freshman life.

“My personal peer adviser has been so friendly and really good,” Megan L. Amram ’10 says. “She tries to reach out, but I’m so busy I can’t meet her as much as she would like to.”

However, she concludes that “it’s nice to know [the program] is there, even if I don’t really need it.”

A program doling out 185 stipends at $1,000 each, in addition to the $60 it devotes to each freshman in the class to be spent at the discretion of the fellow, can slowly become a rather pricey endeavor. An estimated $300,000 has been put into the Peer Advising program, leading one to hope that with such a hefty price tag, modifications are in plan.

Early plans to improve the program involve a new setup where PAFs will be matched by entryway to the freshmen’s academic and extracurricular interests, an improvement that will amend the current divide between entryway and academic advisers.

Lambert-Sluder elaborates, “So if there’s a student who is really interested in the Crimson and wants to concentrate in chemistry, then we’ll try to match that student up with a Crimson editor who’s concentrated in chemistry for two years.”

So perhaps the impending reform to integrate social and academic peer advising will help bridge the disconnect between advisers and advisees. Yet the questions of the ultimate utility and benefit of the program still remain. Few would deny that freshmen need advising, however some would quibble over whether a friendship cultivated by a monetary incentive is exactly what the freshmen are looking for.

Everyone loves having friends, but honestly, who on earth wants to pay for them?