Faculty advisors help students define intellectual interests, suggest departments and disciplines that might offer courses to develop those interests, help students translate their interests into a program of study, and together with the student check to be sure all requirements will be satisfied. Some faculty advisors may provide a friendly ear (and referrals, if necessary), when students are discouraged, confused, or in need of a reality check. Others may keep the advising relationship more formal and professional.
Students need to come to the advisor prepared to discuss their interests and background and primed with information from various sources about placement and prerequisites in subjects they might want to study. The student, not the advisor, is ultimately responsible for satisfying graduation requirements. At the end of the four years, any unmet requirement will result in delayed graduation for the student, not the faculty advisor. If asked, faculty advisors will usually tell students honestly what they think of their selection of courses and what they think is most important in an undergraduate education. But they will seldom volunteer such opinions because they do not want to intrude on students' independence or privacy. Students need to take the initiative to draw their advisors out. Advisees are more in charge of the quality of the advising relationship than they usually assume.
Faculty advisors assume that students are prepared for study at college and are making the transition into emotional and intellectual adults. They stand ready to help if problems arise, but do not want to interfere with the process unless asked. High-achieving students, on the other hand, frequently do not want to “lose face” with their advisors by revealing problems, which they fear will be perceived as weaknesses. A conspiracy of silence arises, and students with problems do not resolve them. Just as students take responsibility for their own education (planning a major, satisfying degree requirements), students must come forward when they need help. They should understand that asking for help is a strength rather than a weakness. It takes a strong person to admit when something is wrong and to take the necessary steps to solve the problem.
A recent college survey found that most students find advising at least satisfactory. Nonetheless, satisfactory advising depends on literally thousands of individual conversations going right, conversations between a student and a faculty member not much acquainted with each other and, in the case of first- and second-year students, perhaps sharing few interests. This is a risky dependence. Furthermore, we have observed that students (and often parents) expect from faculty advisors something quite different from what advisors expect (and are expected by the college) to provide.
Students tend to expect advisors to solve their problems. Advisors see themselves as illuminating problems. Often illumination alone suffices to solve a problem, but sometimes, by itself, it does not. Something must be done and it is the student who must do it.
Students by and large expect advisors to be experts on all courses taught in the college, all requirements for the degree and graduate schools, and placement into individually appropriate levels for beginning a subject. Many also expect deep in their hearts, that their advisors will be "friends."
Faculty, on the other hand, are, to state the obvious, intellectuals. They like to theorize the world and to prompt their advisees to wonder at and explore it as urgently as they do. They frequently do not know the instructors or curricula in fields quite different from their own. They cannot be expected, for example, to suggest "good" courses because all courses are "good" for some students and some purposes. Nor can an advisor be expected to place students in the right level course, or know the prerequisites for the major, in subjects in which they are not expert. This is information students must gather from the relevant departments and publications and bring to their individual advisors so that, together, they can plan an individually appropriate and exciting program of courses. Moreover, many faculty members are frequently not completely clear about the finer points of college rules. For these, consult advising deans. Perhaps most importantly, few faculty advisors will think it appropriate either to tell students what to take or to ask many personal questions. However, they are eager to give frank opinions and hear about their advisees’ lives.
Professor of Russian Literature Patricia Carden has written an essay about how to make the advising relationship work. It appears in the Student Handbook, and we recommend that you borrow your student’s copy and take a look.