A Day of Academic Advising

Half hour appointments started at 9 a.m. and ran through 4.40. p.m; one half hour break for lunch. While I have been doing academic advising for first year students for about 25 years, I am always curious to see what each new crop of advisees is like. Will they have their acts together when they hit my door or will they present themselves as works of chaos and indecision? Truthfully, the latter is the exception and, in some ways, I find a student in doubt and indecision to be a “healthier” one that the other extreme where they come to me with note cards laying out all of the courses they intend to take in their college careers (I kid you not, I have experienced this!). Over the years I have honed my techniques for advising and my current approach seems to work fairly well. It is a holistic one where, after a few welcoming words, I ask them to tell me why they chose to attend William and Mary. I then launch into 3 points that I suggest they bear in mind in the months ahead: 1. Their first year in college, and especially the first semester, will be a time of significant personal adjustment. They will likely be lonely at times, perhaps homesick, they will miss their high school friends and family a lot and, indeed, they may question their decision to attend William and Mary. I suggest that all of these reactions are pretty normal. 2. They will be an exceptional student if they attain mostly “A’s” in their courses—especially in the first year. Indeed, I tell them that they should expect B’s and an occasional C (faces convey pain at this news!). 3. I advise them to seek balance in their daily lives—to find something non-academic that they are passionate about as a release from the pressures of the academic. I myself am biased toward the physical and so I encourage them to find some form of physical exercise—a club sport, a pick-up game of soccer, a visit to the gym–anything to counter balance the intensity of their academic demands.

Conversation then moves to the nuts and bolts of their class schedule for the upcoming semester. Most were only one, at most two, courses short of a full schedule and so we debated back and forth the merits of particular courses that would help meet their General Education Requirements (GER’s). I warned them that, when they registered the next morning, they would find most classes closed and that they would have to hustle to fill their schedules. We talked about various approaches to gaining entry into chosen classes—emailing professors, getting on wait lists, going to the first (and second and third) class and asking the professor if slots had opened up etc. I had one little gift to give them that would (hopefully) reduce their anxieties: an override into my Soc 250 class. This I gave them with the advice that they should use it as “their security blanket”—keep it in place in case they could not gain access to all their chosen classes; I assured them that they should feel totally free to drop my course if they found a better deal! With a few words of encouragement, and a commitment to always promptly answer their emails, they left feeling a little more secure than when they arrived—at least that is my hope!