Peer Academic Advising: Not for First-Years

Improving academic advising for freshman is one of Dean of Freshman Elizabeth Studley Nathans' top priorities, and her rallying behind the cause has brought it to the forefront of College issues. Faculty members have come to a consensus that first-years need better quality advising, echoing dorm room sentiments across the campus.

Most of the 238 advisors for first-years are residential proctors, some of whom are more familiar with Harvard's course offerings than others. This varying knowledge on the behalf of proctors, combined with a complex departmental structure and a course catalog that is almost 1000 pages long has made Nathans' task of improving advising for first years a particularly difficult one.

Some have suggested that first-years would benefit from more peer advising, and point to the existing Prefect Program and its upperclassmen volunteers as a group through which a formal peer advising system could be implemented.

But the Freshman Dean's Office (FDO) now strongly discourages its prefects from offering their first-year charges any academic advice at all.

"Prefects are specifically not expected to tell students which courses are good," Nathans writes in an email. "Among other things, each course is a different experience for every student who enrolls. What is a good course for one person may well be a disaster for another."

But if prefects are forbidden from sharing their academic experience with their prefectees, are first-years missing out on a valuable opportunity to get advice about classes and concentrations?

A MATTER OF CONFIDENTIALLITY

Nathans says she doubts that a formal peer advising system for first-years could ever be created because students cannot see other students' records. She says that an advisor's access to those records are central to good advising.

"Neither prefects nor other undergraduates may see the student records on which comprehensive and appropriately-informed advising needs to be based," Nathans writes.

Some proctors agree that access to records gives them an advantage over potential peer advisors.

"The confidential information is very helpful," says James I. White, a proctor in Greenough.

But White also notes that many students decide to explore academic areas at Harvard that depart from what they were interested in in high school.

Others are not convinced that peer advisors would be at a serious disadvantage in giving good advice because of their lack of access to a student's academic records.

"I think that information is incredibly irrelevant," Melanie A. Brennand '01, a former officer of the Prefect Program. "As far as I'm concerned, everyone starts on a clean slate here."

THE ROLE OF A PREFECT

While Nathans explicitly notes that prefects are not suppossed to give academic advice to their prefectees, outside of the FDO, proctors and prefects alike disagree about what kind of advice is appropriate for prefects to give to first-years.

The prefect program website notes that "While proctors shoulder the responsibility of formal academic advising and personal counseling, prefects can help direct first-years to other College resources, like peer counseling groups or department offices."

However, many prefects say that they not only direct students to department offices, but also give informal advice about what classes they have liked in the past.

"We never tell them that they can't give advice on classes," says Jonathan F. Cahill '01, a former officer in the Prefect Program.

Brennand says that a prefect's role as an informal academic advisor depends on their relationship with the proctor.

"A lot of proctors haven't gone to Harvard," Brennand says. "With these proctors, prefects often play a large role."

White says his impression is that "prefects in their training are told that they can only give advice if asked about a class."

"I think that the University is saying, 'We don't train the prefects like we train the proctors and we're not going to give them the same role,'" he says.

And some close to the prefect program wonder whether more formal responsibility on behalf of the prefects for academic advising would really benefit all those involved.

"The people who would be good at prefecting are not necessarily the type of students who would be good at peer advising," says Noah S. Selsby '95, a proctor in Thayer.

Brennand agrees.

"Not every prefect is the perfect student or has the best academic sense," she says.

THE DIRT ON CONCENTRATIONS

Some academic departments already have peer advising in some form, though not all concentrations offer such programs.

Selsby says he can envision a program in which peer advising and formally administered academic advice from proctors could complement each other.

"It would be a good idea if all the concentrations got together and made students an accessible resource," Selsby says. "If a prefect said, 'Don't do Gov., that's a stupid concentration,' a proctor would likely step in, because that type of advice is far too unspecific."

White notes how influential academic advice can be to wondering first-years, regardless of where the advice comes from.

"First years are vulnerable to what people say," he says.

And though some may be in favor of giving prefects a more official advising role, Nathans is firm in her opinion that upperclass students are not prepared to formally advise first-years on academic issues.

Nathans will continue to explore options for improving first year advising, options that will likely not include a formal peer-advising program.

"The prefects specifically do not do formal academic advising," she notes. "The most involved and most successful of the prefects indeed are critically-important advisers as well as role models and friends to students in the entries to which they're assigned."