As the registration period comes to a close today, undergraduates may now switch their focus from picking classes to choosing a major and faculty advisor.
Though Tufts' official bulletin states that a student should plan a concentration program with the assistance of a faculty advisor in his or her major field, students' expectations of advisor involvement in this process vary widely.
Some find advisor participation to be less than satisfactory and would prefer more interaction. "I expected that someone would be there to help me figure out exactly what it is I should be taking and doing based on my interests," senior Joyce Rollor said. "But that didn't really happen. I had to go to the dean to get good advising."
Others found advising satisfactory only because they had low expectations. "I don't think I had too many expectations, except that [my advisor] would make sure I got to graduation in terms of picking courses," senior Trevan Marden said.
Still other students have had very difficult experiences with advising at Tufts. "My experience has been quite negative because I've had four different advisors," senior Austen Eadie-Friedmann said. "The first two were never available - office hours didn't mean anything - and when I could finally get ahold of the professor, they knew little or nothing of proper procedure."
Friedmann was left to navigate his academic decisions completely on his own. "I was left to fend for myself," he said.
Senior James Fraser had an opinion as to why experiences like Friedmann's occur. "It's because of the numbers of advisees some have," Fraser said. "There's no way to know 100 kids well if you only see them once a year, or sometimes less for double majors."
Associate Professor of Economics David Garman currently advises 28 students, all of whom are economics majors. "In the economics department, we probably have about 400 declared majors right now, and when you take out people who are on leave, that leaves about 15 faculty to advise about 400 majors," Garman said. "So, if you do the math, you end up with somewhere between 25 and 30 for each."
Fraser, who usually seeks out advisors primarily for their signatures, says that the process of meeting with advisors becomes "just another loop to jump through."
He added that "when a student does have a problem, their advisor doesn't know them as anything more than a name, and it's hard to give advice to someone you don't know."
"The best idea would be to switch the relationship from signature-giver to real person," Fraser said.
And in effecting that switch, the ball is often in the students' court. "My experience is that about a third of the students you know pretty well - the reason is because they come to see you," said Jinyu Li, a lecturer in the Chinese department. Li, who currently has 22 advisees, said that "ideally, I would like to know them personally very well."
Because she has observed that the main anxieties of first-year students primarily relate to academics and acclimating to campus life, Li makes an effort to meet one-on-one with her new advisees during the first weeks of school in order to get to know them better. She also utilizes an SIS printout with students' pictures to tie faces to the names on paper.
"I advise [professors] to go to the [SIS] Web site and get students' photos," she said. "Psychologically, it's important to try to recognize them to make them understand and feel that someone is there. It's your job."
Li can, however, imagine an advisor not knowing an advisee's name: "I can understand very well because you don't see them often," she said. "Professors teach two or three courses and have students in those as well."
Li tries to send students e-mails encouraging them to come see her, but understands that often they are overwhelmed with work. She said that much of the advisor-advisee relationship depends on students' personalities: Some enjoy coming to office hours often, while others do not.
Students who have been unsatisfied with their advising experience cite a lack of communication between themselves and their advisors' departments or faculty - a problem that surfaces when professors leave on sabbatical and their advisees are unaware of the change.
"Most departments vary tremendously in how they handle this - so I can't generalize for all departments - but typically it's left up to the advisor to notify his or her advisees about what's going on," Garman said.
"If I'm on leave but I'm in town and working in my office at Tufts, then I still meet with my advisees," Garman said. "That's not required, or even necessarily expected. If my schedule's going to be different or I am not going to be as available, I always e-mail my advisees and let them know."
In terms of general communication with advisees, Garman keeps e-mail lists of advisees separated by class levels and sends students e-mail reminders when important deadlines approach. He tries to free up extra time to meet with them around such times.
"Well, as you know, there's a huge variation in how advisors approach the job," Garman said. "There are some that make a great effort to stay in contact with their advisees, and there are others that leave it to the advisees to make contact with the advisor. I suspect that cases where somebody leaves or is on leave and the advisees don't know are cases where the advisor expects the advisees to take the initiative and keep in touch."
But this relationship still isn't an easy one. "Sometimes advisees don't do that," added Garman, mentioning instances when his advisees have not taken advantage of his availability.
"In that case, it's their right to use me as a resource or not," he said, adding that in the end, "on both sides, the ideal advisor-advisee relationship takes effort."
"I've seen cases of breakdowns on either side," Garman said.
