“If you push back the concentration choice, and students aren’t getting good advising, and they’re just taking courses willy-nilly, they’re going to lose out,” Tucci says.

A NEW HOME

The leaders of the curricular review are aware of the impending advising crisis.

In the report later this month, they may propose the creation of a centralized advising center to overcome the gap in quality advising that the concentration shift would bring.

“An advising center is certainly a possibility, as a building or a collection of a lot of staffed advisers,” Gross says.

Biel says he thinks the advising center could provide a sense of continuity for sophomores as they move from the first-year advising system to the House.

“We are thinking about a more centralized form of pre-concentration advising,” Gross says. “We have to treat pre-concentration advising more seriously, as a job, and not just as an add-on.”

But although the advising center is under serious consideration by Gross and other leaders of the curricular review, several head tutors say such a center was unlikely to have knowledgeable staff and would probably lead to an impersonal experience for students.

Tucci says that “it would be very bad if someone is giving chemistry advice and that person is not a chemist,” but added that even if the center had advisers who were trained in different disciplines, its advice might be better left to the departments.

“For concentration advising, you need to talk to somebody who knows the field and knows the course work very well...I would be slightly suspicious of if there was an adviser out there who was not a chemist, but who would be a full-time, professional advisor in this advising center,” he says.

“We’re always talking about getting more people in the departments,” he adds. “At least if the advising is in the departments, we at least know that people are getting to the departments to get some advice. If the advising is in the advising center, we don’t know that students are coming to the departments.”

Thayer proctor David D. Kim, a second-year graduate student, says he believes the advising center is likely to be impersonal.

“I wonder whether that is really that much more effective, considering the time and commitment and money that would need to go into that kind of advising,” Kim says. “The proctor has the advantage of seeing students on a daily basis and can take his personal interactions with students into consideration. If a student simply goes to an advising center, that holistic element of the advising experience is missing. You would simply be meeting with that adviser for 30 minutes two or three times a year, and that would be it.”

Sharon R. Krause, head tutor of the government department, points out that given what she says is a lack of interest in the present advising system, she questions whether students would use an advising center.

She says that with the exception of study card signing week, tutorial office advisers are “not very busy.”