Advising day could certainly be improved

Maiya Harding, Staff Writer

If you are a planner like me, you already know exactly which classes to take and when so you can graduate exactly when you want to. This would take away the purpose of getting the approval from your advisor. However, sometimes advisors have inside information to know that a class will not be held a certain term when the Course Catalog says it will be. This happened to me in planning for next semester and my advisor was helpful in moving ethics to the Spring and putting Con Law on my Fall semester schedule.

If he had not done this, then I would not be able to graduate when I planned because Con Law is a required course for my major. My advisor checking over my schedule saved me a lot of future stress. I also had a couple of specific questions related to my credits and path and he helped me to answer them. For these reasons, I would say that advising day, at least this semester, was incredibly helpful for me and I have a lot of appreciation for my advisor. As someone who has changed their major, I have had experience working with a couple of advisors.

My previous advisor claimed to have around 120 advisees and would set up our meetings over the entire week. This was nice because I would schedule mine on Monday and have all of Tuesday off. In this case, the meetings were also incredibly pointless. The advisor would have no time to be of much help to specific questions and was visibly frazzled. I felt as though I did not need someone to waste their time verifying my classes when that is all they did, and they were too busy. In cases like this, I would see value in making advising appointments optional for students who feel they need them. Or even having them over the course of a few weeks leading up to registration and taking away advising day altogether.

This would eliminate the stress of fitting everyone in within a day and add in a day of classes that could be important to a course. I also have issues with advising day on a Tuesday. It sucks. You get the weekend off, then a day of class, then a day off, then a few more days of class. It is confusing and it feels like another Sunday and throws off your weekly schedule. It would be ideal to have it on a Monday to be a three-day weekend or a Wednesday to break up the week. Additionally, M-W-F classes are held three days a week while T-Th are held only two days. Why take away from a class that meets less as it is? All in all, I see some value with advising day, but I also see some downfalls with it for both students and advisors. It sucks especially when some professors still hold class on our day off.