Brown students split evenly over their assessment of academic advising, a recent Herald poll shows, with 49.2 percent of respondents saying they are satisfied and 48.8 percent saying they are dissatisfied with the University's academic guidance.
Students polled by The Herald were asked to qualify their overall experience with academic advising. 11.4 percent of students said they are very satisfied, and 11.0 percent said they are very dissatisfied. Exactly the same percentages of students - 37.8 percent - said they are either somewhat satisfied or somewhat dissatisfied with advising.
The poll shows students' satisfaction with advising varies based on their class year. The poll suggests first-year students are the most satisfied with advising, with 15.2 percent saying they are very satisfied, the highest figure of any class. Overall, 58.6 percent of first-year students are either somewhat satisfied or very satisfied with the advising process. 35.6 percent of first-years said they are somewhat dissatisfied with advising, and 5.2 percent of first-years said they are very dissatisfied, the lowest figure of any class.
But 56.9 percent of seniors polled said they are either somewhat dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with advising at Brown. 18.1 percent of seniors said they are very dissatisfied, the highest figure from any class in this category.
Though The Herald poll suggests the sophomore and junior classes are split relatively evenly in regards to advising - with close to half either satisfied or dissatisfied in each class - only 7.3 percent of sophomores polled said they are very satisfied with advising, the lowest figure from any class.
Deputy Dean of the College Stephen Lassonde said the decreasing satisfaction as class years rise reflected in the poll was consistent with institutional research on advising conducted in the last decade.
"The mystery to us is why (advising satisfaction) doesn't improve more after a student declares a concentration," Lassonde said.
He said the University has worked to address the problem by assigning students who do not opt for a new adviser to the adviser they had as first-years, but added that the change was probably too recent to be reflected in the poll results.
Isabel Lopez Polanco '10 said she had a positive relationship with her first-year adviser. "She's Spanish and so am I," Lopez said of her first-year adviser, a professor in the Classics Department. The two continued to meet last semester, though Lopez plans to concentrate in international relations and has yet to meet with someone in her field.
But some students said they felt their first-year adviser would be ill-suited to continue to guide them because of their different academic interests. Tim Eisen '11, who said he intends to concentrate in mathematics or the sciences, was matched with a first-year adviser from the Department of the History of Art and Architecture through the Curricular Advising Program.
"She did tell me not to take five classes, which was good," Eisen said of his adviser. He called his Meiklejohn peer adviser "pretty good," but "aloof."
The University is "in the business of firming up a lot of the parts of the advising system," Lassonde said, noting that the Meiklejohn peer advising program and Department Undergraduate Groups fall under the advising umbrella. Since students at the University generally have concentration advisers after their sophomore year, Lassonde said communication among departments was a "long-term solution" to improved advising. He also stressed that the University was trying to communicate with students.
"My concern is that we have advising available to (juniors and seniors) who don't know they need it," Lassonde said. He also said the independent nature of Brown students was a barrier to advising.
"How do you get people to take advice when they have this ambivalent relationship to it?" Lassonde said.
Sam Schmelzer '11 described his first-year adviser as a "sounding board" for his interests and added that he is more likely to use friends than professors for academic advice.
"I enjoy trying to figure out things on my own," said Sam Schmelzer '11. "In general, I'm not the type to talk to an adviser."
Ashley Friedman '10, a development studies concentrator, said her advising experience at the University has been "fine," but noted that there is only one full-time faculty member in her field. As a result, Friedman said she has "just talked to teachers" informally about her academic work since her first year.
The Office of the Dean of the College "will be introducing a number of new approaches to the mentoring of sophomores for 2008-2009," Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. She also wrote that her office and the Office of Student Life have been working to "increase opportunities for students to engage with faculty outside the classroom and after hours" through the Faculty Fellows program. The dean's office's recent budget increase will allow these programs to be put in place "right away," Bergeron wrote.
Though most students interviewed by The Herald did not disparage the advising system, many described sparse interactions with their advisers.
Economics concentrator Ho-hin Choy '10, who is pre-med, said he met with his first-year adviser in the Biology Department "maybe twice" and has since used friends and the Internet for advice on classes.
"I felt like I knew everything he told me," Choy said of his adviser. "He didn't know that much about pre-med requirements and that's what I had questions on."
Rob Hallberg '08 said his Meiklejohn adviser was "very good" at helping him figure out "what classes to avoid and take" when he first arrived at Brown. But Hallberg, a political science concentrator, said he does not have an advising relationship with a faculty member. Instead, Hallberg said he relies on the department secretary and Web sites for choosing his classes.
"(The Internet) tells you what you need to take," Hallberg said.
Osmar Olivo '11, who said he will probably concentrate in computer science, said he talked to his first-year adviser in the engineering department "for like five minutes" - long enough to obtain a PIN number to log onto Banner and choose his own classes.
"I guess since it's Brown, you can do whatever you want," Olivo said. "Most people I know haven't really talked to their advisers."
The Herald poll was conducted from March 10 to 12 and has a 3.6 percent margin of error with 95-percent confidence. A total of 643 undergraduates completed the poll, which was administered as a written questionnaire to students in the Sciences Library and in the Post Office in Faunce House.
