At Professors and Pastries on February 20, 2008, from left: Robert Duggan ’10, Katelyn Jones ’11, German Studies Professor Michael Resler, and Paul Wooten ’10. Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

In her fourth-floor office in the far reaches of Carney Hall one wintry morning, Elizabeth Nathans was discussing how the University helps students set their academic goals and chart their course through four years. The former dean of freshmen at Harvard, who arrived in the summer of 2005 as the founding director of Boston College’s new Academic Advising Center (AAC), Nathans observed that “Boston College has known for many years that advising was an issue” for students. She was being diplomatic.

Dissatisfaction with academic advising has been the source of “perennial complaint” among students for years, according to Donald Hafner, a political scientist who is now vice provost for undergraduate academic affairs and who oversees the AAC. Hafner hopes that the University’s new vision for comprehensive undergraduate advising, of which the AAC is the key component, will turn around the long-standing discontent documented in heated editorials in the Heights, student government presentations to members of the Board of Trustees, and, several years ago, a set of disconcerting responses by Boston College students who participated in a respected national survey of freshmen.

With more than 1,600 freshmen in the College of Arts & Sciences alone, all juggling core requirements along with the prospective demands of major and minor programs, it may be that academic advising will always be seen to fall short of need. “In every institution I’ve ever been to,” says Rory Browne, the AAC’s associate director, a genial, tweed-jacketed, Oxford-educated historian who has taught and advised at Yale and Harvard, “students have been dissatisfied with advising.” But unhappiness among Boston College undergraduates has been higher than the national average, according to results for the Class of 2007, polled at the end of their freshman year, in 2004, by the national UCLA-based survey “Your First College Year.” Nationally, 60 percent of freshmen reported themselves “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with academic advising, compared with 45 percent at Boston College. The gap, says Hafner, reflects the malfunctioning of a system put in place 50 years ago and only marginally adjusted since.

If there has long been general agreement that the system was broken, consensus about how to fix it has been slow in coming, mainly owing to skepticism among faculty about “professionalizing” a function that many consider central to their role. Under the plan Boston College has adopted, AAC staff will take on some advising, but their main role is to select, train, and support faculty in their advising capacity. “Boston College has an expectation that faculty members will advise students as part of their duties,” says Clare Dunsford, an associate dean in A&S who has been liaison to sophomores.

By hiring Nathans and Browne, Boston College has imported decades of experience in the advising trade. Before her 13-year stint at Harvard, Nathans, universally known as “Ibby,” served as a dean at Duke University’s college of arts and sciences, where she cofounded a freshman advising center. Browne was a residential dean at Yale from 1983 until moving to Harvard in 1991, eventually becoming Nathans’s associate dean of freshmen there.

“The thing that matters most” in advising, says Nathans, “is that the student makes a connection with someone.” Nathans still keeps in touch with her Vassar undergraduate advisor, who, after learning that Nathans had handed in a blank blue book at the conclusion of an important exam, asked to see her class notes. He saw that she had been trying to cram in the recommended as well as required reading, and in “one of the best half hours” of her academic life, showed her how to manage reading, then and forever after. A good advisor, says Nathans, helps students ask questions and find answers for themselves. What do I love? What am I good at? What happens when my family wants one thing and I want another? The ability to guide this process of discovery depends on building a relationship over time, she says. “It doesn’t happen in a 15-minute required conference”—a reference to what often seemed the default setting under the old BC advising system she is rebuilding.

Under that system, the majority of incoming freshmen were paired with advisors by random computer assignment and then reassigned to department-based faculty after declaring a major. Exceptions were students in the Honors Program and in programs like Cornerstone and Perspectives, in which course teachers also act as their students’ advisors. This close contact with a teacher devoted to the well-being of his or her own students is the gold standard, says Hafner, and a long-term ambition is to see every freshman in “a course-based advising situation.”

In the meantime, however, the AAC has set up systems to improve matching between advisors and students, including searchable databases listing both parties’ areas of interest, and has provided training for more than 170 faculty and administrators serving as advisors to freshmen and pre-major sophomores, who are now expected to see their advisees between three and five times during a semester—instead of once, as under the previous system. Nathans also cut the number of students in summer orientation advising groups from 60 to eight, and then arranged for the students to be shepherded through course registration by the same advisor, which had not been the practice.

Nathans: “The thing that matters most is that the student makes a connection with someone.” Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

On an afternoon in December 2007, more than 90 students crowded into Gasson 100 to chat with 20 or so faculty members, academic advisors, and alumni who work in the fine and performing arts. The session was part of a program titled “Professors and Pastries,” launched by Browne in 2006. The atmosphere was relaxed, characterized by carolers, hot cider, macaroons, and social chatter about careers in the arts, among other subjects.

Sophomores Margaret Galiani and Robert Smith were working the event for the center, welcoming guests and handing out lists of the faculty and alumni in attendance. Like many A&S undergraduates, Galiani, now a psychology major, came to Boston College considering a career in medicine or law. She attended Professors and Pastries sessions during her freshman year, and found the faculty “so ready and willing to talk” that she felt confident about scheduling follow-up appointments.

The free-flow format of Professors and Pastries, said Smith, a biology major, encourages even shy students “to ask very personalized questions, and hone in on [their] real concerns.” Smith changed his major to biology from political science after exploring “a whole bunch of options” in sessions with Browne and other faculty, and after attending several Course Exploration and Deciding panel sessions set up by the AAC, gatherings at which faculty talk about their disciplines, major requirements, and potential career paths after college. “I was very lucky to have these resources when I came here,” said Smith.

Another sophomore who has found a lifeline in the AAC is Stafford Oliver from Baltimore, who wanted to study public policy and the global economy, but was unsure how to go about it. In a telephone interview, he said he had found it “kind of difficult navigating through all the courses” and spent a tough freshman year “not liking my classes at all.” Remembering freshmen dean Sr. Mary Daniel O’Keeffe’s invitation at orientation to anyone who wanted to talk, Oliver found his way to the AAC and discovered a sociology course on globalization that has led him to choose sociology as his major. (O’Keeffe, who had been advising freshmen since 1989, died in May 2007.)

Perhaps one of the most valuable lessons students take away from advising, formal or informal, is that academic and career paths often take surprising twists, and that wrong turns are part of the journey. “Your passion is what you need to find in your four years here,” political scientist Kenji Hayao told students at a history and social sciences Deciding panel in mid-November. Hayao recounted his undergraduate experience at another New England university as a physics major who grew to dread the next physics course but delayed switching to political science until the fall of his senior year—not a route he would recommend. He urged students to sign up for “a course you don’t know anything about. . . . You don’t know where your interests are going to take you.” The key, he emphasized, is “to decide what is good for you; not what is good for someone else.” In a decision aimed at fostering “maturity in decision-making,” Nathans announced in January that freshmen will no longer be permitted to declare a major until registering for second-year courses in April, a standard policy at many universities.

A survey carried out in February 2007 by Boston College gives a snapshot of how Nathans’s reforms are working. Nearly three-quarters of freshman students reported that they found their advisors readily available and communicative, with 69 percent agreeing that their advisors were concerned about their academic welfare and 62 percent saying their advisors were concerned about their personal welfare. The results were considered encouraging enough that pilot projects were inaugurated this semester in two A&S departments to see if the center’s strategies and procedures can be helpful in improving advising for majors.

Jane Whitehead is a writer in the Boston area.

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