More departmental advising

Let’s say a junior history major named Sally is choosing her classes for senior year. Sally just can’t settle on the right courses to finish her major next spring, and she wants some academic advice.

In order to give Sally a meaningful recommendation, an adviser would have to possess a pretty deep knowledge of the history department’s professors and be able to read the fine print about classes, which doesn’t come through in its blurb in the bulletin.

Sally’s adviser would also have to have some knowledge of her particular strengths, the kinds of classroom environments in which she thrives and the subjects that interest her most.

But generally, this is not the case in Steele Building. If she goes to talk to an academic adviser about her course selection, chances are Sally won’t be offered much more information than she found in the course catalogue. And the likelihood that she and her adviser have previously established any sort of personal relationship is even slimmer.

Poor Sally.

Of course, Sally might have been able to get some good suggestions from an adviser in the history department, but there’s nothing on the academic advising website that tells her how to get in touch with departmental advisers.

So Sally sets aside 30 minutes to meet with an adviser in Steele Building, only to have him pull up the same website she was looking at before she made the appointment.

Given the multitude of courses offered at UNC — especially in a large and dynamic department like history — it’s no small task for full-time advisers to learn the ins and outs of their assigned departments’ course offerings.

And this insider perspective can’t be achieved overnight. It takes years of interaction with students both before and after they take these classes for an adviser to accrue thorough knowledge of a department’s operations.

But this is exactly the type of advice many students need, and in an ideal world, Steele Building would be the place to get it.

Unfortunately, our advisers spend most of their time addressing basic questions about requirements and simply getting students to graduation. On the whole, these advisers spend more time cleaning up messes than preventing them.

It’s important to note that this isn’t the advisers’ fault, per se. The inhabitants of Steele Building are, for the most part, understaffed and overworked.

But if Steele Building can’t provide real academic advice, they must work harder to delegate this responsibility effectively.

This is where departmental advising comes in.

Steele Building needs to do a better job of coordinating with each department’s in-house advisers to help students like Sally know where to go with their questions.

And if the advising office makes an attempt to ensure departmental advising is of a consistently high quality across all majors, Sally might actually find someone to answer her questions.

Meanwhile, back at Steele Building, they’ll have more time to focus on the basics that already consume most of their time.