Improving academic advising for freshman is one of Dean of Freshman Elizabeth Studley Nathans' top priorities, and her rallying behind the cause has brought it to the forefront of College issues. Faculty members have come to a consensus that first-years need better quality advising, echoing dorm room sentiments across the campus.

Most of the 238 advisors for first-years are residential proctors, some of whom are more familiar with Harvard's course offerings than others. This varying knowledge on the behalf of proctors, combined with a complex departmental structure and a course catalog that is almost 1000 pages long has made Nathans' task of improving advising for first years a particularly difficult one.

Some have suggested that first-years would benefit from more peer advising, and point to the existing Prefect Program and its upperclassmen volunteers as a group through which a formal peer advising system could be implemented.

But the Freshman Dean's Office (FDO) now strongly discourages its prefects from offering their first-year charges any academic advice at all.

"Prefects are specifically not expected to tell students which courses are good," Nathans writes in an email. "Among other things, each course is a different experience for every student who enrolls. What is a good course for one person may well be a disaster for another."

But if prefects are forbidden from sharing their academic experience with their prefectees, are first-years missing out on a valuable opportunity to get advice about classes and concentrations?

A MATTER OF CONFIDENTIALLITY

Nathans says she doubts that a formal peer advising system for first-years could ever be created because students cannot see other students' records. She says that an advisor's access to those records are central to good advising.