“Rensselaer has an advising system that works!”

The truth is, for the vast majority of students, this is just not the case. During my freshman year, we started talking about improving the system here, and I’m still holding my breath. Don’t ask me how long they were talking about it before I even knew how to pronounce Rensselaer. Now I’ve had enough. For those of you that know me, it takes a lot to reach this point. At an institution like ours, where the student is the customer, where education is the focus, where preparing for the future is the goal, we are doing, at best, a mediocre job catering to the professional growth of our students.

I frame it as “professional growth” because we forget that an advisor is not just who you go to for a signature or who you consult about class registration. For the latter purpose, we have something called a course catalog and a system called CAPP. Thanks to these useful tools, it should be no surprise that our advisors are feeling a little lonely around registration periods.

Advising is about so much more. It is about mentoring, networking, teaching, counseling, consulting, guiding, building, growing, informing, befriending. The list goes on.

To make our advising system a true model of these verbal gerunds, everyone in the Rensselaer community has a job to do.

Students: Start treating your advisor as indispensable. Many of our professors have had long careers in both the private and public sectors where they’ve developed tremendous professional backgrounds and networks. That is a huge asset that is highly underutilized by our school. If you analyze what makes the ivies so successful, it is primarily their gigantic networks. We need to start utilizing ours both internally and externally. Seek advice about career positioning, research opportunities, stories of personal experience, and even private sector contacts. Go to them for advice on life and if you find you cannot connect with your assigned advisor, find someone else! Utilize your “paper advisor” for formal matters, but make sure you are seeking guidance during your four years here at Rensselaer. Fifty percent of the wealth is found within the classroom, and the rest must be pursued independently, so if you are not making use of the faculty—the faculty you’re paying for—then you are hurting yourself in the long run.

Faculty: Change the paradigm for advising to include opportunities for professional growth and not just course related or otherwise useless info that makes you dispensable to students. I know some of you do a tremendous job advising students, but for those of you that don’t, remember that you work in a service industry: our students are the customers and they’re paying good money to learn from you. We can find people to read off the course catalogue to us over on Burdett Ave., but we can’t find lifelong experts in our career fields just anywhere. Please take your job seriously. Think of advising as something on par with “a major committee assignment.”

Rensselaer purports to offer a world-class education to its students; world-class advising should be part of the package. Indeed, the culture of advising must also change. Attempt to personalize what can be a highly impersonal academic experience. Remember that attitudes are contagious, so don’t treat your advisees as a nuisance—be positive and be encouraging. Offer them something they didn’t know was available. No one said they had to come to you either. It works both ways.

Administrators: Start taking the issue of advising much more seriously. List it under the “Undergraduate Plan” if you have to. Just find a way to give it a priority status, and don’t let the issue linger the way the advising taskforce recommendations have for the past three years. The “Take Your Students to Lunch” initiative is a great start, but you need to help craft the vision that gives merit and meaning to the advising system so it is seen as useful and not gratuitous.