I went to my counseler at school for advice on a career and he said I changed my mind too much and that he couldn’t help me if I didn’t pick a major. He said I didn’t actually know what I wanted to do. That’s why I came to him for help.
I told another counseler about a career I wanted to do, and she repeated everything back to me like a parrot. It’s like she never even helped me. I was disappointed when I walked out.
You were assigned to him because he was returning from sabbatical and didn’t have anyone to advise. So they probably assigned all new people to him.
A college advisor can have a great many students to advise and doesn’t have time to keep up with one student. Plus, there’s this, y’know, whole “teaching” thing they have to do. Advisement is just a part of what most faculty are required to do, and many of them don’t like doing it.
In any event, it’s up to you, the student, to keep track of requirements and be prepared for your advisement appointment. I kept a spreadsheet of all the courses I took, the grades I got, and whether I took the class there (and when) or transferred it in. It took about 30 minutes to initially set up, and five minutes a semester to keep up with it. I then went through the schedule and curriculum and came up with six or seven classes. If my advisor disagreed, fine. If my advisor was cool with it, she’d sign off and I’d schedule. I never had a problem with missed requirements. If I had a question about whether this class satisfied that requirement, I asked before I scheduled. All of this took a minimum amount of time during the advisement period, but it saved me from having to take additional courses.
Not one advisor in HS or College was every helpful to me, & several were quite literally impossible to meet with.:mad::mad:
MsRobyn, they assigned people to an advisor who had just gone on sabbatical, not to one who had just returned from it. Might as well have assigned them the Tooth Fairy.
What exactly are these “college advisors” everyone is talking about?
(Anthropology degree, California State University, Long Beach, 1973)
:p:D:D:rolleyes::smack:Like I mentioned in the OP, a friend of mine who works as a transcript evaluator told me that this was the general unwritten policy for most colleges. It wouldn’t have occurred to me had she not offered that explanation. I always chalked it up to incompetence.
Posting before coffee is never a good idea, including now. Sorry.
Since you’re older and have experience in the work force, you might find UMUC to be more helpful. It’s a sub-college specifically for folks in your position. Most of the classes are offered online (a lot of the students are in the military overseas), and those that are in person are generally evenings and weekends. A definite downside is that the degrees offered are limited, and tend to be more career-focused. Neither pre-med nor mathematics is an option. But given those two interests, you might be interested in, say, biotechnology. PM me if you’d like to know more.
In response to your question, I’ve found that advisors are generally not terribly helpful because they don’t know you. Sure, they can give you aptitude and interest tests, but that doesn’t necessarily give them a whole lot more to go on than if you’d come in and said, “I like science; what have you got?” The strategy that’s consistently worked for me is to find a professor you like, or failing that, one whose class you like, and set up an appointment to talk to them. They’ve seen the work you can actually do, and will have a much clearer idea of what you can do with the skills you’re learning, and what industries might be a good fit for you. Talk to more than one, too, to get a broader sense of what’s out there.
And if you can’t come up with even one class or professor you like, or none of what they have to say appeals to you, then you’re barking up the wrong tree. At that point, you should broaden your search: browse the majors in the course catalog and contact the department head or professors in those departments; talk to friends with similar interests about their jobs and find out how they got there; look into doing part-time volunteer work or unpaid internships in your fields of interest rather than school (until you have a clearer idea of what you want to do), and talk to the people you meet there.
And ask around here - there are lots of Dopers (including me) who love their jobs and will gladly tell you all about them.
Basing your opinion on hearsay and unsubstantiated information seems more akin to incompetence than the practice you are questioning… again, I work at a University, have worked at two, have about 10-12 close friends at various Universities (ranging from teaching colleges to R1 institutes), and have never heard of any such “misinformation campaign.”
I don’t know how things work at schools where there are staff whose primary job is advising (as opposed to professors who are doing tons of other things as well), but I got dropped into the deep end with my first few advisees. One day I didn’t have any, the next day they started popping up on my Banner account without warning. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I could answer most of their questions about the English major, but I didn’t know what the prerequisites for calculus were, or which courses they would have to take to add a second major in education. I’m sure I was unhelpful, but it wasn’t on purpose.
Anyway, your best bet is to take charge of your own education. Read the course catalogue – carefully! – and plan out when and how you’re going to meet the requirements for your major. (Also, bear in mind that it’s not the advisor’s job to choose a major for you; part of your job as a student is to know your own strengths, interests, and goals.)
I used to advise students but only if they were already math majors, so I had no role in choosing their major. I myself was never given any training, although there was a chief advisor in the department that I could refer hard questions to. I certainly never gave knowingly bad advice, why would I? One thing we had to do was to evaluate if the student was following a program that would lead to graduation in the expected time and sign off on that. Sometimes we were wrong and in most such cases the dean would waive whatever the missing requirement was, assuming the academic advisor had signed off on it.
Whether I was a good advisor or not, I cannot say. As I said, I had very little guidance. I did enjoy meeting with students, which some of my colleagues didn’t.
Of course there’s the corollary to that, which is “any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.”
And what, pray tell, makes your friend an expert on the “unwritten polic[ies] of most colleges” that are as stated a deliberate attempt at fraud?
Put me in the “incompetence before malice” segment, and not just with universities but any bureaucratic institution where serving the customer base or providing a quality product is less important career-wise than political sussing and brining in grant monies. The Central Intelligence Agency–a typical target for conspiracy theorists on both the right and left of the political spectrum–is actually a poster boy for this. Even their greatest intelligence victories have been bumbling, nearly incompetent efforts, despite the fact that the Agency employs some very good analysts and has a top notice special operations division recruited from the SOCOM community.
The truth is that professors, and especially at the university level, are far more focused on research, bringing in grant money, and political infighting than they are in students or teaching. (This is not without reason, as tenure and performance have almost nothing to do with teaching ability, and the bulk of students are basically a bunch of gormless mooks the brightest of whom are not capable of having an intelligent conversation with the professor and who will suck away his time if he lets them.) They probably don’t keep close track of requirements and prerequisites, which can change from semester to semester. They certainly don’t have time to participate in mandatory-but-unspoken cabals to intentionally jerk students around. And for the most part, the teaching part of a university is a break-even proposition at best; tuition covers salaries (staff and administration), operating costs, and maybe the subscriptions to journals and books for the library. The real money is in donor grants (mostly athletics and arts) and research funds (engineering, sciences, psychology, medicine), which is why the philosophy and history departments are typically relegated to some small, should-have-been-condemned building that even ROTC won’t use.
As for high school advisors, for the most part these are people who don’t actually have much in the way of practical experience themselves, so they’re sort of like the salesmen who work in high end auto sales; they’ll talk a smooth game about how great the Lexcedes Quattroporte 4500 XLSi is the most elegant and refined high performance sport sedan on the market and is “Worth…every…penny!”, and then at the end of the day go out back and climb in their twelve-year-old Honda Civic DX to drive home. My high school counsellor got my SAT scores before I did and called me out of A Chem in order to tell me that they were the highest scores she’d ever seen, and that I should seriously consider going to the local community college to get a degree in teaching or programming a computer or something. I once attempted to have a discussion with her about my actual goals (going to a Tier I or Tier II university for degrees in physics and mathematics) and she looked at me as if I’d grown three extra heads while talking to her. (Admittedly, this was a school where only a small percentage of students would even go on to vocational training, but still there were a few brains who went to school for engineering or science.)
My college advisors were also of little help, to the point that I actually had to track down my EE advisor to get him to approve my class list because he was never in his office during posted advising hours (another political wing-ding who couldn’t teach a worm how to crawl). My physics advisor actually neglected to tell me of the post-publication scheduling of a “Applied Math for Physics” class that would have been very helpful despite the fact that the instructor was literally in the next office. Not a conspiracy to keep me in for another year, just shear unapologetic laziness on his part.
If you want to get pissed off about the cost of something, get pissed about textbooks, which are outrageously expensive, of often indifferent quality in both content and construction, are revised frequently but without adding any new actual content aside from changed problem sets, and are of no better practical use than more enduring technical handbooks and Schaum’s Outlines. Really, there was no reason that we needed three different textbooks to get through the thermodynamics/thermofluids sequence when a copy of Keenan & Keyes Steam Tables and about thirty pages of notes would have been more suitable.
Which highlights another problem, especially at the university level, which is that in regard to pedagogy it is typically the blind leading the blind. GTAs are thrown into teaching with little or no actual instruction, and either cope with it or find they enjoy it, but either way, are generally neither supported or encouraged to do more than get by.
If you’ll give me permission to use this, I promise I’ll add it into my next risk assessment briefing at the O-6 level or higher.
Stranger
We always hated that they made us talk to our advisors once a year in college. We could read the damn course catalog and schedule of classes ourselves, for fuck’s sake. I, myself, scheduled myself a double major. It wasn’t hard, or anything, but I had to do it early enough to make sure I completed the requirements for both.
When I got to grad school, the undergrads didn’t know the requirements for their own major! Why didn’t they read the course catalog during orientation, like we did?
I never once had a conversation with an advisor in college, nor would I have had any questions if I had.
Advice on what to major in? What kind of schedule to take on? How are they supposed to know? They’re not your mom. You pick the classes you want to take, you buy the books, you figure out what building to go to and you show up for class. What are the advisors supposed to tell you? If you can’t manage that much, you aren’t ready for college anyway.
We (faculty and staff) work exceptionally hard to make sure students in our department don’t waste their time or money. It would be very easy to let students slide through the cracks because we’re understaffed and underfunded. We spend time in faculty meetings every week making sure that students are progressing, aren’t mis-registered, aren’t missing in action. I have not worked in any college or university that made a deliberate effort to make money from students’ mistakes or lack of guidance. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but that if it’s happening at your school, you might want to think about going somewhere else.
ETA: My experience was like Diogenes’s–I guess there was advising at my college but I never heard about it. You went to the departments that interested you and talked with some professors about the requirements for the major. This was fine with me.
The truth is that this is true of some schools and not others.
I’ll start off by saying I went to one of the largest universities in the US in the early 90’s. (That shall remain nameless.) You ever heard that joke about what the difference between college and a university is? The school I went to thought that was the greatest piece of advice they’d ever heard.
Anyway put me down for they didn’t give a ****. My first experience with their “advising” was taking a calc and physics test at orientation to determine what physics class I should take. I had only taken pre-calc so my score on that test wasn’t too good. (Oh, and my last semester of high school I took stats and programming so my algebra and trig skills were extremely rusty.) I did very well on the physics test which pretty much just asked “Do you get Newton’s first law?” (Answer yes because I’ve seen Mr Wizard.) The consequences of those 2 results were examined by a physics professor who pretty much said I should take the hardest intro physics course they had and that the math score shouldn’t be that much of a problem. I’ll spell it out, yes my math skills at the time were a big problem and the physics test was utterly worthless for placement. (Since really, the course was an applied math course. It got worse when half way through they started breaking out linear algebra and multivarient calculus. Knowing concepts like Newton’s first law isn’t much of a help when you’re having problems with the math and that concept is simple anyway. Definitely a surprise when the first test came around and it was 5 questions and basically “Generate the equation for this situation”)
There is no way the professor didn’t know this (He was a physics professor) so I figured he just didn’t care. I could also mention that the only way you could get a professor to mention we had help services is if somebody died. (Note: In my case this is literally true. The only time I ever remember anybody mentioning the help services was when some classmate died of a heart attack over a weekend. That was the one time they bothered to pass out the pamphlets.)
I went to the U of Chicago and my advisor was helpful in terms that related to the school but not my life or my particular situation.
He would help me but the focus was always staying in the U of Chicago.
Now look, I was a poor kid, without any family working my way through college. I kept having to drop a class (usually in December after no refunds at all) to take a second job to earn money, 'cause my car broke down or whatever.
If my advisor had been really cared a hoot about “ME” he would have said, “Mark you’re fighting a losing battle, you need to drop out and go to community college for two year, save your money then go to a state school.”
As it turned out I did graduate, spent way to much money for what I got, a degree that is worthless to me in my current life situation and never will be worth anything. Yes it’s impressive to say I graduated from the University of Chicago, for like 4 seconds, then they want to know about my past jobs and what I did.
There’s nothing I got from the degree at U of Chicago, that I couldn’t have gotten at a state school for much cheaper.
But the focus of my adivsor was keeping me in the school. Which I fully understand, is his JOB. His job is not my welfare, his job is to guide me through the school and keep me there.
This was my experience as well. I had some kind of meeting with my advisor when I was a freshman because it was required, but I had decided on a major and had looked up the degree requirements on my own. I met with her again when I was a senior because I wanted to know if I could wrangle a second degree out of the courses I had already taken. (Answer: yes, but not without dropping the first degree, because I had too much overlap between the two.)
I’m a grad student now and I have an advisor. He’s made some rumbling about how I should meet with him, but…I really don’t feel like it. He’s rather…disorganized. Also, I have to retake his class next semester because I got a C last time around. The fact that I can’t even pass his class indicates to me that his course of work isn’t really in line with my own interests. Plus, he obviously works in academia. I don’t want to work in academia. I am doubtful that he could give me a lot of good advice for how to get the kind of job I want.
He was on a Rose Bowl-winning football team when he was an undergrad at the University of Washington, though. That’s kind of neat, I guess.
Back in the Dark Ages when I went to college (late 70s), we had no advisors at all. Once I finished my gen ed classes, I used the school catalog to pick and choose my English courses (since I was an English major), kind of what you’d do from the menu at Chili’s or something. Periodically, maybe once a year or less, I recall visiting an administrative office on my own–not because I had to–where I’d stand there while this woman behind a counter looked at the classes I’d already taken and then told me whether I was missing anything I needed to graduate–not specific courses, but more like “You need 12 more hours of English classes to graduate”–that sort of thing.