@Lea111 - ok so that’s changed then. You know, it’s possible that these two latest classes (and then the class of '23 beginning in the fall) are just more used to e-vising. That’s pretty much what my daughter was doing the summer before she first registered and she has always had quick responses and great advice. Most questions don’t require a visit.
My D’s substitute advisor last year was super cool. There are some good ones there. But I think he’s been around for awhile.
My advisor has been useful. She is very effective at knocking down bureaucratic barriers and navigating the mazeth at is the UChicago administrative process.
I recognize not everyone has had the same experience, but I know I’m not the only one that has overall positive things to say about the College Advisors.
Long ago my adviser, a lady of a certain age in the English Department, used to shyly ask me whether I was going out on dates. This embarrassed me extremely, and I issued peremptory and non-committal answers. Yet she was clearly concerned about my happiness being so far from home and all and wanted to mother me just a bit. I’m afraid I was too know-it-all to make a good son. However, she gave me one piece of excellent writing advice: Never use multiple exclamation points, it is “forcible-feeble”. Have never heard that phrase from anyone else, but it stuck with me and I have always followed it. RIP Wilma Ebbitt.
@marlowe1 - they can’t ask those questions anymore for fear of a sexual harassment complaint.
@HydeSnark - I wonder if in this new era, they are re-tooling the advising system along with everything else. It would be interesting to know how much of the Class of '21 and onward gets to have a four-year relationship with their advisors.
I really liked my advisor and I think they are all wonderful, intelligent people (a lot of them have a MA or PhD). But because of the nature of the job, they can only give generalist advice that probably only first-years need when they are completely uncertain about what they want to do. So I found them useless but not of their own fault. Just because of the nature of the job.
For instructor consent, independent study, changing majors etc. usually you could just do it yourself or talk to the source directly. I do think everyone should check in with their advisor so they know what you plan to do and give them some peace of mind so they don’t have to worry about you too much.
Maybe they should group advisors by each discipline instead of by each house as they are currently proposing to do. I honestly don’t know why they’re pushing things like the semester system and housing so hard. What is the point of grouping advisors by house? The raison d’etre is to foster house camaraderie but I do not see how one-to-one meetings with the same house does anything when everyone’s interests diverge so much. The university really needs to stop pushing these changes; it feels like changing for the sake of changing and I want to see empirical evidence rather than vague arguments. Where is the data, controlled for various variables, of student satisfaction, stress, academics, etc. within a quarter or semester system?
My son’s found the same thing so far, both with the advisor he was assigned and the informal advising given in the department he’s interested in. But as Skyrior mentioned, he’s one to read the course catalog and not need help on the basics, so he’s mostly using the advisor to confirm he’s making decent choices and to navigate difficulties.
Academic advisors can do a lot, and do for some people.
There was one contemporary of my daughter, whose father was a regular poster here. He (and she) credited her advisor (it was the same one for all four years) with setting her on a path to getting a Goldwater Scholarship and then a Rhodes Scholarship. It was the advisor who first proposed the idea, and who held her hand through all of the various processes involved.
Of course, nothing like that happened with my kids. My daughter had a different advisor every year, and the first one lied to her about requirements. They were all just entry-level bureaucrats.
Re: associating advisors with houses. [Adopts Thurston Howell, III Westchester lockjaw] Because, darlings, that’s how we do it at Hahvahd and Yale.[/lockjaw] At Yale, almost all the advising is done by residential college. All faculty are associated with one or another residential college, and generally there’s a group of faculty who split up the first-years in that college 7-8 apiece, and then one or two faculty from X department advise all the X majors in that college. Usually the same people who advised you as a first-year continue as your advisor until you declare a major, but people can ask other faculty, not necessarily associated with their college, to act as their advisor during that interregnum. The dean assigned to a residential college has to sign off on all course schedules, leaves, majors, and other such things.
That system does have some advantages, because it promotes real continuity and real faculty contact. You run into your advisor informally from time to time. But that’s because the colleges have separate dining halls, and the faculty eat there sometimes. The college dean (and, perhaps more importantly, his or her administrative assistant) gets to know the students in the college fairly well, especially those who need or could benefit from some getting-to-know. It’s the dean’s admin who serves the cracking-the-university-procedural-code function for students. (Plus, one of my friends spent almost 20 great years working in an organization where the dean’s admin got her a job.)
Agree with @DunBoyer that advising is an issue. My kid has had a number of advisors mostly for a month at the beginning of the year then they leave and are not replaced. Major advising seems to be optional in some majors and has been on a drop in group basis which does not lead to a quality experience. The schedule is an issue but people may not realize when they are being rejected for internships based on that. My kid had to turn down an opportunity at a top NY firm. When it was offered Spring quarter had not even started so there was no way to clear with Profs and it would have been 3 weeks missed which would have been devastating to final grades in any case. Most REUs start a month before UChicago is out and the dates are a set program so that was not an option for my kid. This year accepted an offer early based on people saying it would work out but the way it has worked out is that the internship placed them in a different job on a different site where they can start late but missing out on a lot of the special training and networking stuff at the main site. Having now just started the quarter kid realizes there is absolutely no way leaving school early would have worked with these classes anyway.