"It was nice to be able to have someone older as a mentor. And when you get older its nice to relay the hard-earned wisdom and for people to learn from your successes and failures," said Anne-Marie Oreskovich '99, president of the Women in Math and co-president of the undergraduate Math Club.

"Most math majors get a sense about which classes to take from talking with their peers. I have chosen my classes based on discussion with friends who have taken the courses and the professors teaching the courses," said Samit Dasgupta, co-president of the Math Club.

The Women in Math and Math Club programs aim to create a more formalized process for disseminating the advice that math concentrators already seek from each other, Dasgupta said.

The Psychology Department started a peer counselors program this year to help prospective and current concentrators get a student's-eye-view of the concentration.

"We aren't supposed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all of the department's requirements," said Frank J. Farach '00, peer counselor in psychology.

The peer counselors give a more personal opinion of the classes than just the nuts-and-bolts advice offered by Faculty advisers, Farach said.

" It's important to get a peer's perspective, because a professor's or official adviser's perceptions of a particular class are often very different from those of a student who has taken the class," he added.

Advise at Your Own Risk