It’s that time of year when Bradley University students are conflicted. They fear midterms and essays while worrying about next semester’s schedule.
The fear of overworking students is where advisors come in to help relieve some of that stress by guiding students to complete their major and minor requirements to graduate on time.
These meetings are mandatory and give students a walkthrough of which courses they should take for the next semester.
Advising meetings can take anywhere from five minutes to 30 depending on how prepared the student is. According to Dr. Dickhaus, the acting chair and a professor in sports communication at Bradley University, about 50% of students come prepared for advising meetings and those meetings tend to go relatively quickly.
However, he said that the most difficult meetings are with students who have not fulfilled their Bradley Core Curriculum requirements and have not looked at what classes they need to take for the following semester. This is difficult because some BCC requirements include 20+ classes that are offered and most students do not know which class they want to take of those options.
However, there have been mixed reviews among students on whether these advising meetings should be required to register for classes.
Students at Bradley can’t register for their classes until after their advising meeting when the advisor will then lift a hold that blocks students from officially registering. This issue has impacted many students, including sophomore computer information systems major Ibrahim Perez, who went to his advising meeting but registered two weeks late because of a mistake his advisor made.
“I went to the meeting and I had to email my advisor back because she did not take off the hold,” Perez said. “I ended up registering about two weeks late after I went to the advising meeting.”
Perez’s meeting last semester went better, but Perez still holds the belief that there should be some minor tweaks to the advising process.
“I had a senior who was in the same department as me and he was able to more or less make my schedule,” Perez said. “I think it [having advisors] is helpful, I think the hold part, not so much…it’s up to human error and I think that I’m better off without the hold.”
Despite Perez’s bad experience with the advising meetings, other students have had fairly decent experiences with the advising meetings, including senior Adam Sarabia, who is a computer science major with a cybersecurity minor.
“My advising meetings have all been pretty well,” Sarabia said. “I’ve already had plenty of them and they’ve all been just booking 15 minutes out of your time and we don’t really talk for more than 10 minutes.”
On top of class advising, Sarabia also received career counseling and a resume review from his cybersecurity advisor.
“When I got the first email from my minor advisor, she wanted me to look through Dr. Young’s list of classes,” Sarabia said. “She includes in there [her email], ‘I want to talk about job opportunities more so than what classes you’re going to take’, which none of my other advisors have ever talked about that.”
Sarabia was extremely thankful for the extra work his advisors put into their meetings, especially going through his resume, and making sure that he has had internships that would set him up for success in the computer science and cybersecurity field.
While both of these students had completely different experiences with their meetings, both students said that the meetings were mostly quick and laid back rather than stress-inducing which for the time of year these meetings occur, is more important than everything else.
While there have been no announcements about changes to the advising format, it is a topic of discussion if an automated system that removes human error is the best way to go for the foreseeable future because of some of the issues that have occurred in in-person advising meetings.