Engineering Mentorship Program is improvement on Tufts advising

Freshmen often enter college with vague ideas of what they want to study and have even more malleable ambitions for their future careers. With every semester of navigating academia, and with every mistake made and lesson learned, students fine-tune their interests in search of a major and, ultimately, a life path. The advice of upperclassmen, whose one or two years of seniority represent an innumerable quantity of wisdom, is an invaluable resource for their underclassmen counterparts.

It is with this in mind that two juniors, John and Michael Kenny, founded the Tufts Engineering Mentorship Program, a group whose mission is to connect freshmen and sophomore engineering students with juniors and seniors who have similar goals and can offer their experiences to the benefit of both the mentee and the mentor. These partnerships would be assembled not just on a basis of shared interests, but on a basis of real compatibility, with the ultimate goal of providing underclassmen with a mentor with whom they feel comfortable on both an academic and personal level. Just introduced this school year, the program capped its membership at 70 students, but is looking to expand.

While this student initiative should be widely praised, it raises an unavoidable question: Why does a program like this seem so necessary? Is the university doing enough to offer support and guidance to underclassmen?
So little emphasis is placed on pre-major advising that incoming freshmen have relatively no say in the adviser to whom they are assigned. Students interested in biology, French and peace and justice studies may all be advisees under the same faculty member, perhaps a philosophy professor who only recently began teaching at Tufts. It is no wonder that freshmen often feel as if they are left to navigate the system on their own, guided only by unreliable snippets of advice and word-of-mouth suggestions about which classes to take.

Yes, the first year of undergraduate education is a time to explore potential fields of study and take the classes that pique one's interest, but there are some requirements and advisable academic choices that cannot be ignored. Students should feel comfortable meeting with and seeking the guidance of their pre-major advisers, and should not feel as if they are only in place to offer logistical suggestions about how to fulfill foundation and distribution requirements. Peer mentorship programs should be helpful, but not necessary. Instead, the university should make changes to the existing pre-major adviser assignment system. This could be accomplished with a solution as simple as allowing incoming freshmen to select an adviser in their preferred area of study. While peer mentorships are a partial solution to problems presented by the current advising system, making changes to the system itself should be a university priority to help underclassmen find their paths in a timely, organized fashion.