As a joint concentrator in Women, Gender, Sexuality (WGS) and government, the experience Christina Ahn ’05 had with advising offered glimpses of both sides of the remarkably broad Harvard advising spectrum.

Government, the second largest concentration, offered her advising in impersonal, one-shot deals, but with the promise of frequent availability.

“They don’t know your history, but there’s someone there,” Ahn says of the government tutorial office.

She says she expected a different style of advising from the smaller WGS department. “They would know my history more personally, have a file for me; they keep more personal contact with you, they’ll e-mail you about a deadline whereas I might not get that from gov. If I miss a deadline, I miss a deadline,” she says.

Differences abound in how individual departments advise their concentrators. From the personnel involved—everyone from graduate students, peer advisers, faculty within and without the department, and House tutors—to the various scheduling methods for advising—by appointment, walk-in, or published office hours—it is not always easy for concentrators to get the information they need to choose the best classes or stay on track with requirements.

In an October 2001 memo obtained by The Crimson, then-Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 appealed to University President Lawrence H. Summers to take note of poor advising in some academic departments and push for improvements.

Referring to an anecdote about one student who had slipped through the cracks of the government department’s advising mechanism, Lewis wrote, “This is a scandal. Harvard is cheating this student and stealing his money. If we can get the faculty—or, in the negligent departments, anyone at all—to pay more attention to students, the quality of the academic experience at Harvard will soar.”

Almost four years after Lewis wrote the memo, concentration advising information remains scattered, uneven, and often confusing.

PINPOINTING

THE PROBLEM

Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences David R. Pilbeam says the Curricular Review Committee on Advising and Counseling, which he chairs, looked at concentration websites and found only six that were “really good.”

“If I were a student, I would be completely baffled,” Pilbeam says. “We would like to see concentrations shepherded in a direction of greater clarity and less variability.”

“Whatever the requirements are, they should be spelled out in a way that’s clear, and ideally, spelled out in the same way across all concentrations,” he adds.

But the system now seems to hold a lot more variability and a lot less clarity. Undergraduate Program Administrator for the Department of English and American Literature and Language Inga Peterson says that as a new administrator, she herself has been frustrated and confused with the lack of centralized resources. When writing e-mails to concentrators, Peterson says she looks to the Freshman Yard Bulletin for information about events and other available sources of guidance on campus.

“It seems kind of silly for me that that’s where we’re cobbling info for concentrators about the University,” Peterson says. “What bothers me is that I’m working full time here and if I can’t find it, I wonder how much more difficult it is for the students themselves to find it.”