Advising Day is a gift for freshmen

Lauren Abbott, Staff writer

November 1 is Advising Day.

This is the first year that there is going to be an entire day set aside just for advising, but what does this mean for students, specifically freshmen?

As a freshman this is the first time that I get to schedule my own classes and the lack of information has left me and many other freshmen confused.

A lot of us do not know what Advising Day actually is.

Many freshmen seem to think that advising day is the day that we schedule our classes. Some have also thought that we scheduled before advising day and did not know that your advisers have to sign off on your classes.

This confusion seems to come from the lack of information that is being given to the freshman class.

Our first semester of college was scheduled for us by our advisers.  Not having scheduled our first semester of classes ourselves leaves us with nothing to work with in regards to how this process is supposed to go.

Luckily for me, I am an honors student and because of that, I was assigned an upperclassman mentor.

We were able to go over some scheduling details that I was confused about and now things regarding WebAdvisor and the scheduling process make a little more sense.

I think a session about scheduling and Advising Day can and should be incorporated into the iMU classes to make sure that every freshman will at least have some understanding of what to expect when it comes time to plan for spring semester.

While it may be confusing, I am happy that we get the day off from classes.  Not only can we meet with our advisers, but it also allows more time to catch up on work and assignments.

We are being thrown into trying to figure out how to schedule on our own for the first time without having all of the information of what is expected of us and the steps we need to take to ensure that we are properly setting ourselves up for success here at Mercyhurst.