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Harvard GSAS to Overhaul Advising in 6 Departments, Dean Dench Announces

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The Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences will overhaul advising across six academic departments to address longstanding concerns about structure and transparency in the advising process, GSAS Dean Emma Dench said in a Tuesday interview.

The changes — months in the making — implement recommendations made by the GSAS Graduate Admissions & Graduate Education working group last fall. The GAGE report, commissioned by former FAS Dean Claudine Gay, called for comprehensive degree requirements, clear expectations for students and faculty, and the creation of an “advising village” that includes multiple mentors.

“We have six pilot departments” that will be pursuing “full GAGE implementation,” Dench said, adding that other departments are also implementing certain recommendations, such as the advising village.

In addition to the six pilot programs, GSAS relaunched The Advising Project, which provides advising resources and workshops for faculty, Dench said.

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“Faculty can just sort of drop in and find out more about advising, and see what models we’ve got for better advising,” Dench said.

Starting on Oct. 22, GSAS will hold six open-enrollment faculty workshops to help “faculty and students optimize their advising relationships” over the course of the fall semester, according to the GSAS website.

The initiatives seek to address concerns about ineffective or poorly structured advising and its impact on student mental health, which have long been complaints raised by graduate students.

Dench said the new programs hope to remove the “guessing game of advising.”

“Often, the advisor is not doing anything wrong or anything like that,” Dench said. “It’s more that we all need to articulate expectations.”

The majority of GSAS students — between 84 and 94 percent — reported their primary advisors to be “excellent” or “very good,” the report found. Nevertheless, the report read, “students who experience less effective advising experiences cannot be dismissed.”

“In many cases, it is the lack of structures to support individual advising or the absence of departmental processes to help students progress that can lead to a breakdown in the faculty-student relationship and, in some instances, an inability on the part of the student to thrive in the program,” the report read.

Dench also added that graduate students could also look beyond just faculty members for support during the academic year.

“They might imagine an expanded village that includes friends, narratives, etc., who can be supportive,” Dench said. “It’s a long and sometimes a lonely process of writing a dissertation.”

—Staff writer Maeve T. Brennan can be reached at maeve.brennan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @mtbrennan.

—Staff writer Angelina J. Parker can be reached at angelina.parker@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @angelinajparker.

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