Advising Adversity

The transition to college isn’t easy. How should you make friends, and who should you avoid? What concentration should you choose? And what on earth is sociology, anyway?

Advising is Harvard’s very limited bulwark against this confusion, and it has some room for improvement. Harvard has assembled an intricate web of advisors to meet students’ needs. First-years are assigned a residential proctor, an academic advisor (sometimes the same person), and a peer advising fellow — an older student assigned to provide social support. As students move into their residential houses in sophomore year, they are assigned a tutor and later a concentration advisor.

Often, the fit between a student’s interests and their advisors’ expertise is imperfect at best. Achieving a better fit requires students to actively seek out graduate students and professors who better align, a burden that may feel light to many but falls most heavily on those who are least familiar with the modes and conventions of academia.

While the advising system seems broadly effective in its social advising and we commend our PAFs for their excellent work, academic advising leaves much to be desired. Harvard prides itself for its rich pool of resources yet many students describe struggling to find them. A restructuring of the advising system can lead to better-actualized graduates by making it easier for students to sift through the vast arsenal of opportunity Harvard provides.

Social advising is strong, but it can be improved. Just as first-year students are connected with PAFs, sophomores and juniors would benefit from similar relationships with older peer advisors. The transition toward equipping PAFs to provide academic advice also strengthens their role by recognizing that social and academic success are often intimately entwined (although we wish that new responsibilities would come with additional pay). Similarly, upperclassmen can still benefit tremendously from discussing course choices with peers who have sat in those same classes. Older PAF analogues could perhaps be integrated into the house system, providing the mix of academic and social support we prize.

Logistical and career advising would benefit from more substantial overhaul. Many students have expressed dissatisfaction with the sometimes cursory nature of advising on Harvard’s myriad requirements. Harvard should make sure that academic advisors have the familiarity with the undergraduate course catalog necessary to offer valuable advice on course selection.

Making greater efforts to match first-year advisors with the admittedly fluid academic interests of first-years will help. Recognizing the diversity of non-academic factors the influence advising needs is also key: advisors should be trained, for example, to understand the different advising needs of First Generation-Low Income students.

The College should also make career advising a mandatory part of the advising curriculum. Currently, the Office of Career Servies presents a valuable tool for students. However, making some student interaction with OCS mandatory will provide students with a helpful nudge in the right direction and overcome some of the friction of the current system.

The final goal of the advising system, perhaps hardest to quantify, should be supporting intellectual curiosity. The existing system goes some way toward this goal, with an understandable focus on course selection. However, it’s important to remember that the vast sea of Harvard’s resources extends from research programs to extraordinarily well-funded extracurriculars to many and varied travel fellowships.

Harvard needs “intellectual curiosity” advisors whose role is to demystify this tangled web and offer advice tailored to each student’s academic interests. The Economics department offers a list of professors and their areas of expertise to students looking for thesis advisors. The College should take inspiration: Give undergraduates a list of potential advisors and their respective academic interests. This would give students the opportunity to receive valuable academic advice from aligned sources.

So much of what sets Harvard apart is the scale and diversity of its non-curricular resources. A student who goes through their four years without proper advising loses access to much of what makes Harvard special. That means be proactive, of course. Don’t wait for a sometimes lumbering advising system to point you in the right direction.

But it also means that the investments in better advising will yield large dividends. The College is complex — good. Help us manage that complexity

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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