Advising puts burden on USD faculty and students

With midterms wrapped up and the semester winding down with each passing week, spring advising is fast-underway at the University of South Dakota.

Students will meet with faculty to select classes for the upcoming semester and fine-tune their remaining semesters at USD to ensure all the requirements are in order for graduation.

Although there are professionals at USD whose primary job is to advise students about their academic collegiate career, too many students are slipping through the cracks because of those tasked with advising.

These problems are occurring for students at all academic levels, from first-years to seniors.

Advisers who advise first-year and sophomore students have too many students to deal with for them to adequately provide the necessary attention needed for each advising session.

While this method of breaking down advising among faculty and staff has no doubt improved the advising experience from years past, realistically the more than 200 students per professional adviser has to work with is still putting a heavy burden on both the adviser and advisee.

During their junior and senior year, students are then paired with a faculty adviser within their department major, and while this is supposed to come as a benefit for students, it can cause more confusion than help.

Faculty are not necessarily trained to be advisers and should not have to bare this burden so ill-equipped.

By having to advise students, faculty are forced to take away their time on lesson plans and other valuable research time.

While there is a benefit to upperclass students having department faculty within their major as academic advisers, more attention needs to be placed on making sure faculty advisers are knowledgable on all the academic catalogs and current graduation requirements.

The same should hold true for the professional advisers advising underclass students.

If a strong foundation is not set in place right away at the beginning, there will be nothing but havoc to come in the future.

(Graphic: Emily Niebrugge / The Volante).