Awash in Cash, Advising Program Takes Shape

Peer advising fellows were treated to a surprise dinner at Fenway Park’s EMC Club Monday and learned that in addition to an expected $1,000 stipend, each would receive $300-a-semester to spend on their 10 freshman advisees.

With the additional $600-per-fellow allocation, as much as $305,000 could be spent on the new program.

The roughly 190 fellows are assuming some of the duties of the former Prefect Program since they are also assigned to entryways. Prefects indirectly received $20 per student for entryway study breaks throughout the year. That funding is administered by freshman proctors.

Haining Gouinlock ’07, a Prefect Program board member and future advising fellow, said the prefects received “very little funding” from the College.

“Every once in a while the F[reshman] D[ean’s] O[ffice] would give us a grant for freshman-wide events,” she said.

Although there will be half as many study breaks, proctors will continue to receive the same study break funds, and groups of 10 Fellows will receive additional funding for throwing a dorm-wide event once a month.

“It’s so amazing,” said Kate Cosgrove ’07. “It’s so hard to get funding for most activities.”

Associate Dean of Advising Programs Monique Rinere wrote in an e-mail that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) is “generously” funding the program. FAS first recommended the program as part of its curricular review.

“We feel it is very important to support our freshmen and the students who want to support and guide them throughout the year,” adding that the funding is “in line” with the budget of peer advising programs at other schools.

Monday’s training session consisted primarily of “preliminary brainstorming about what our roles should be,” according to fellow Patrick Bauer ’07.

Some of the topics discussed in small group sessions included creating a website for the group and plotting possible events, according to several fellows who attended the session.

The Advising Programs Office is “opening up the process to our input,” Bauer said. “They are interested in...our perspective.”

Aside from the expectation that fellows will contact their 10 advisees over the summer and that they will welcome them on move-in day, fellows said yesterday they were not sure exactly what their role would involve.

“It definitely looks like there is a lot of work to be done in terms of ironing out the specifics,” Cosgrove said.

Nevertheless, Cosgrove credited organizers “for pulling together as much as they did in 10 weeks.”

During the question and answer portion of the event, one student asked Rinere about the selection process.

Some fellows were accepted into the program without interviews.

“It was clear that we would not be able to interview all 500 people. So what we did was something similar to what admissions does, which is: If you can’t interview everybody yourself, then you rely on proxies,” Rinere said in an interview last week.

“We made a decision to accept some of the students without an interview...based on several factors: their applications, recommendations by deans, members of faculty and the SAB, and the applicants’ references,” she said.

Fellow Brigit M. Helgen ’08 said that at the training session, Rinere “made a point of saying...there wasn’t any sort of nepotism involved.”

Nevertheless, Rinere wrote in an e-mail that organizers would “refine the process somewhat” next year.

Rinere said that the concentrations of selected Fellows was similar to the make-up of the student body.

Kaavya Viswanathan ’08, whose recent book, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, And Got a Life,” was pulled from bookshelves after she was accused of plagiarism, was one of the fellows present at the session, according to several attendees.

—Ying Wang contributed to the reporting of this article.

—Staff writer Nina L. Vizcarrondo can be reached at nvizcarr@fas.harvard.edu.