USG plans advising reforms

The USG announced its plans to recommend reforms to the academic advising program at its meeting Sunday night, after identifying eight problems with the system during recent meetings with deans of the residential colleges.

USG members plan to meet with Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel along with the residential college deans to propose reforms of the advising program.

No date has been set for the meeting because "we want to be really informed before we make a decision," USG Vice President Jesse Creed '07 said.

"We recognize that we have a great advising system at Princeton — it's better than the programs at our peer institutes — but we want to make it a lot better," he added.

At Sunday's meeting, U-Councilor Liz Gough '07 presented the problems identified through meetings with the deans.

The first of the problems identified is that adviser recruitment does not take students' interests into account, especially with regard to the departments that the advisers represent.

"There are three advisers from economics for all five colleges and also three for astrophysics," Creed said at the meeting. "Obviously, a lot more people want to be economics majors than astrophysics."

The departments of ecology and evolutionary biology, religion and philosophy do not have faculty members in the advising program.

Gough said the second major problem is that students expect "one-stop shopping on advice."

"Students expect the level of guidance they received in high school, where they could talk to their advisers and find out everything about every course available," Gough said. "They don't realize when they come here that they have to talk to their peer advisers and other students as well."

Gough said incoming freshmen are "anxious" and "afraid to ask stupid questions," which must be addressed to make the program more efficient.

"We're trying to make sure that there are as many checkpoints during the beginning of freshman year as possible when advisers meet with their advisees and check up on them," Gough said.

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She also said that the student advising initiative, which includes peer advisers and undergraduate fellows, was thought to be "fragmented" by many of the deans of the colleges, stressing that the presence of peer advisers and fellows within the residential colleges was "dismal."

Another concern brought up at the meeting was the lack of contact between upperclassman and freshmen and sophomores.

"We want to try and make the undergraduate fellows a bridge between the upperclassmen and underclassmen, which was probably the most important factor behind its creation," Gough said.

Creed said the USG will aim to create an incentive for more people to join the undergraduate fellows program.

"There has to be an incentive other than offering free meals in the dining halls," he said.

The final problem highlighted at the meeting was the lack of contact between peer advisers and academic advisers and between students and their advisers.

"Until you're a junior or senior, you're not really getting in contact with your professors," Creed said. "We want to raise the comfort level between students and their advisers so that any student would feel comfortable asking their professors to lunch."