Absentee advisees can be a byproduct of the tension between the intellectual bigwigs Harvard attracts and the “admissions mistake” mentality among students.

And even after overcoming the intimidation factor, a professor may not be available.

“The faculty advisers are generally quite helpful when meeting with students, but sometimes some professors are hard to catch,” Assistant Head Tutor of Physics David Morin writes in an e-mail.

As such, students must often take the extra step to seek out guidance.

“If you really look for an adviser, if you’re proactive, make some effort, you can have a much better advising experience,” says economics concentrator Radu Tatucu ’05.

Some departments find that mentorship can be easier to facilitate, while finding advisers well-informed enough to guide students about requirements and classes is more difficult.

After conducting surveys of concentrators, Biochemical Sciences Head Tutor Richard M. Losick says he found that many felt they had good mentor advice, often from Harvard Medical School professors, but it was not easy enough to get technical advice.

“Fabulous scientists can give general advice about courses and careers, and lead tutorials,” Losick says. “But on the other side of the river, they are not always experts on ‘how do you meet the physical chemical requirement?’”

But students in other concentrations see the opposite problem, complaining about the abundance of technical advice and the lack of personalized advice.

After all, the most obvious purpose of advising is for students to collect study card signatures, and departments are sometimes quick to assume that advising revolves around the study card.

“I think they can benefit if there were more structured things throughout the semester,” biology concentrator Asya L. Agulnik ’05 says. “Right now, it’s centered around study cards.”

“It’s one thing to get your study card signed, it’s another thing to make sure you’re not missing a course that really is quite central to what you want to learn,” says Nancy L. Rosenblum, chair of the government department. “That’s the core of advising.”

The tutorial office “is not an atmosphere that’s conducive to actually sitting down and thinking about a long-term program,” she adds.

Most students want advising to lean more towards support. “Academic advising treats [advisers’] role as ‘okay, what classes should you be taking,’” says Barbara J. Eghan ’05, a history and literature concentrator, who dubs study card advising as a “kiss-off at the beginning of the semester.”

“I’m a human being before I’m a student, but there’s no recognition of that within any advising system here,” Eghan says.