<p>I know that the information is all up on the website, but I was wondering if anyone had a more personal take on it/could speak to what it's like as a student.</p>
<p>I'm looking at some housing that involves RBA, primarily Maseeh, but my choice isn't based on their RBA system. I think I'd like seminar, but I dunno if I want to devote two extra hours a week to something when I want to do a lot of extracurriculars.</p>
<p>So, anyone able to advise me on the advising system?</p>
<p>(I already posted this in the MIT 2015 thread, but thought it might be more easily seen here.)</p>
<p>The c/o 2015 website has good descriptions of each type of advising as well as pros and cons for each; also if you’re planning to do certain extracurriculars (like play in MITSO or MITWE) you can’t do seminar advising. (I’m sad; seminars sound cool.) They also have very helpful info about how many hours various extracurriculars occupy weekly so you can add that to your 48 or whatever hours for schoolwork and calculate sleeping time :)</p>
<p>I hope somebody else will speak up, because I’m pretty far away from my own freshman advising experience, but I did traditional advising and I was satisfied, although I think a good seminar would have been more fun.</p>
<p>It is true that the seminars take two hours a week, but that isn’t a huge time commitment, and you can definitely do an EC or two and do a seminar. I mean, after all, a seminar’s a smaller time commitment than a UROP, and many upperclassmen balance a UROP with their standard extracurriculars. If an extra two hours a week is going to put you over the edge as a first-semester freshman, then you’re probably thinking of too many extracurriculars.</p>
<p>I come from a fairly small school (only 71 kids in my graduating class and most of us have been together since middle school, with some together since kindergarten) and many of my teachers know just about everything about me. So a big thing for me is finding an advisor who will get to know me well. Is there any difference among the three as far as how much your advisor will get to know you? Also, what about seminars being a good place to meet friends?</p>
<p>If you do traditional advising, your advisor may well just be someone who signs your forms (not saying this is true for all advisors, though. Some are very eager to get to know their students). You have a much better chance of them getting to know you if you do a seminar though. I thought freshmen advising seemed like a bit of hit-and-miss so I went for a seminar because I was interested in the topic and this way I could actually choose my advisor instead of being assigned a random person. </p>
<p>As for seminars and making friends, I wave to the people in my seminar when I pass them on the corridor, and chat with them before lecture if we happen to sit next to each other, but I would call them more acquaintances than friends. The only advising-related place where I’ve seen people become close friends is Terrascope - it’s sort of like an advising seminar, except it’s a much, much, MUCH bigger time commitment, hence the community becomes really close knit.</p>
<p>I already posted in your thread in the 2015 forum but I’ll copy and paste what I wrote since this thread is getting more traffic so other people can know as well. </p>
thanks for correcting!</p>