Harpur College students have been finding it difficult to meet with academic advisers. Appointments are booked until Thanksgiving, and the lines for walk-in hours stretch outside the door on any given weekday.
The office is understaffed, with one adviser for every 2,321 students, a much greater ratio than the 450 to 1 national average. After three staff members resigned and a fourth left on maternity leave, the office was left without the capacity to serve nearly 9,000 Harpur students. In response to this disparity, the University announced plans to hire eight additional advisers. In the meantime, it’s up to us to show initiative and find advice elsewhere.
While adviser input can be valuable, students always have the option of seeking out information on their own. A Google search is quick and painless. Departments typically provide lists of major, minor and concentration requirements online. Sites like ratemyprofessor.com, though not entirely accurate, allow students to select courses based on professor reputations. In a school with thousands of undergraduates, peers are our best resource. The advice of older classmates may prove more useful than professional advice.
Anyone in Harpur knows that even when advising is fully staffed, it’s no easy task to get in to see Jill Seymour. Undeclared freshmen and academically lost sophomores have no choice but wait on line to get life advice from the staff in the Harpur advising office. For upperclassmen however, there is another option. Major advisers are an underutilized resource for those of us who have some idea where they want their academic careers to go. Many departments assign students a specific adviser when they declare their majors, and others just have general advising hours throughout the week. There is no reason to go to Harpur advising for degree planning or course selection once you’ve declared your major. Leave those precious few appointments for directionless freshmen — your professors will have better insight anyway.
Of course this solution requires that professors be readily available. While the University sorts out the situation in Harpur advising as it hires and trains new employees, we implore each department to reevaluate its advising policies. College is hard to navigate on your own. If every department could set aside some amount of time every day of the week for students to drop by and ask questions about their degrees, it would relieve some of the stress on the students and on their academic advisers.
It’s great that some new advising staff is being added to Harpur, but the fact of the matter remains that there is only one adviser for every 2,231 students. We know that growth brings challenges, but it shouldn’t be harder to get in to see an adviser than it is to get a 10:30 bus Downtown on a Saturday night.