Since a report on undergraduate education was released in 2008, the University has increased efforts to strengthen its advising and mentoring resources. While Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron has made student guidance and support a key focus since the report's release, students are also adding their voices to the campus dialogue.
Mentoring profiles
The Undergraduate Council of Students is looking to include personal statements from student concentrators on Focal Point, a tool on the Dean of the College's website that aims to provide students a snapshot of each concentration.
"Focal Point isn't very personal," said Besenia Rodriguez, associate dean of the College for research and upperclass studies, who has been working with UCS on the project. The Dean of the College and UCS nominated about 30 seniors to contribute to the site to give it "a more human element," she said. Rodriguez said these profiles are not lists of classes so much as narratives of the seniors' experiences at Brown, which "weave together the curricular and the co-curricular" while giving students concrete advice about making the most of their college experience. Todd Harris '14, chair of the Academic and Administrative Affairs Committee, brought the idea to the Dean of the College last fall, and they hope to complete the project by late spring, Rodriguez said.
Independently, Norian Caporale-Berkowitz '12 has also been seeking to start a thoughtful discussion about the status of mentoring at Brown.
"It started as a conversation with some of my roommates and fellow seniors about what kind of advising and mentoring relationships they've made over the years," Caporale-Berkowitz said. But he said they realized that "a lot of students get through Brown without solid mentoring relationships."
Caporale-Berkowitz brought this concern to the Dean of the College and afterwards recruited students interested in joining the discussion through a Morning Mail announcement Jan. 25. "(The Dean of the College is) really looking for a solution," he said. "I think they're hoping that students will help them find it because they've been searching for a long time."
One possibility would be an online database of profiles of upperclassmen, describing their academic interests and the opportunities they have explored, Caporale-Berkowitz said. The database could be integrated with a forum similar to Yahoo! Answers, and any student could post a question and get responses from profiled users. Viewers would upvote the answers they found the most helpful, he said.
Caporale-Berkowitz said this would help students find mentors in a way that is "natural, and not contrived." Such a website would give students opportunities to make "organic" connections with peer mentors outside of a systematic and formal atmosphere, he said.
The nature of academics at Brown requires rigorous mentoring, he said, because the open curriculum "is immensely powerful but also terribly dangerous." Mentoring can help ensure that the end product is meaningful, he said.
"I definitely think students value other students' advice as much if not more than faculty advice," said Jonah Kagan '13, who joined the initiative after seeing the Morning Mail announcement. He is also one of the creators of the recently launched Best of Brown site.
Kagan said he found his own mentors outside of the formal advising system. Finding the right people, he said, is just about luck, so this site would be helpful in providing a starting point for building those kinds of relationships.
Harris also expressed interest in Caporale-Berkowitz's discussions. Mentoring is very valuable, he said, and while UCS has been focused on ways to improve the current advising system, it has not explored informal conduits of advising as much.
Student-led initiatives
Other projects are also underway to encourage students to make important connections and to provide them with more academic guidance. UCS has been working with the Meiklejohn Peer Advising Program to create an advising handbook for the upcoming fall's first-years, Harris said.
The idea behind the handbook is to clarify the roles of the student, the Meiklejohn and the adviser. The handbook is unique because "a lot of things are written by faculty and deans," he said. "We wanted something by students, for students."
An increased level of student input is common to these efforts in improving advising and mentoring. Harris' committee recently became involved with the advising emails sent out weekly to first-years by adding a "tip of the week" from Meiklejohns. The input from their peers makes the advice more relevant to students, Harris said.
The committee is also seeking to increase student feedback on their advisers. There isn't the same level of student input on the advising system as there is for the Meiklejohn program, he said. UCS passed a statement Feb. 8 urging the Corporation to consider student input in their decisions on faculty tenure.
"We want to make sure we have the faculty who are the best advisers and mentors in the students' eyes," Harris said.
Taking it to the next level
The Dean of the College is always working on improving advising and mentoring, said Ann Gaylin, associate dean of the College for first-year and sophomore studies. "They're the central preoccupations of the office," she said. The office seeks to create opportunities for students and faculty to connect without being forced to do so, she added.
Mentoring is "advising taken to the next level," said Gaylin. Often, a mentor shares a student's intellectual interests, but conversations between the two guide the student's development
in all areas of life, Rodriguez said. Whereas advising is more about getting questions answered "in real time," mentoring is "a sustained relationship," she said.
Though Brown has a multitude of support structures, there are students "who are too shy to use those resources or don't know they're there," Caporale-Berkowitz said.
The input from his group's discussions about mentoring will help the Dean of the College to find "what would resonate with fellow students" to encourage them to make connections with faculty, Gaylin said.
"So much is dependent on student initiative," she said. Though some students may feel too shy or intimidated to approach a professor, faculty members who are eager to work with students may not take the first step either. "Faculty are shy, too," she added.
About 20 students responded to Caporale-Berkowitz's Morning Mail announcement. The group's discussions have so far been focused on finding ways to foster peer mentoring.
"When faculty are paid for their research, teaching and advising is something they do out of the goodness of their hearts," he said. "With that in mind, peer mentoring seems like a good path to pursue."
While many efforts to improve advising are focused on providing guidance for underclassmen, the Dean of the College is also considering ways to support students who have declared their concentrations. "Concentration advisers can come and go," Rodriguez said, so the office is looking for ways to connect students with long-term mentoring relationships within the same departments.
