By Andres Gonzalez | Contributing writer
Almost everybody who has or is currently attending college knows what an academic advisor is. A professional whose job is to help guide students through their college careers. While this seems like an important and helpful tool, many individuals attending FIU might be able to point you towards a multitude of flaws in our respective system.
Personally, I have experienced a good number of hiccups with FIU’s academic advising system, as well as hearing many additional complaints from my peers around me. Everything I have heard leads me to believe that academic advising could use some improvements, but what exactly could be improved?
Firstly, I would like to highlight some of the flaws one might encounter when going through the process of academic advising. One of the first things that I have personally experienced is that the calendar to schedule meetings does not work.
When attempting to schedule a date through the Panther Success Network, every single date is unable to be selected, no matter how far in the future you go. This means you must use the Success Networks messaging system in order to get in contact with your advisor, which adds an entirely new step to even meeting with them.
Even then, when I attempted to do this in order to resolve or discuss an issue I was having with my certificate, I waited three days for a response, just for my advisor to tell me that they could not help me.
This whole scenario brings me to my second point, a good majority of advisors seem out of touch with day to day student lives. At the very least in my experiences, there seems to be no urgency with solving pressing issues that could affect graduation. This lack of urgency actually led to me having to delay my graduation because I could never get an answer when it came to my certificate.
This issue, however, cannot be fully blamed on the advisor themselves. After all, students outnumber academic advisors almost four hundred to one. Meaning they are more often than not overwhelmed and unable to help students in a timely manner. This, in my opinion, is the biggest issue plaguing FIU’s academic advising system.
Now that I have highlighted some of the issues I have faced, I would like to go over what could be done to solve them. The first solution being to streamline how the MyFiu website works to make everything easier. I would even suggest creating a new academic advising page that is directly under the “academic advising” tile on the website, that way students will not have to deal with the trouble of figuring out that it is actually under the Panther Success Network.
After this I would ensure that advisors have their availability up and actual selectable dates to meet with them. All of this would make it much less of a headache to getting a meeting, but it still does not solve the headache associated with how little advisors there are.
The only real solution to that problem is the most obvious one, FIU needs to focus on hiring more advisors. More advisors would mean better distribution amongst students, allowing problems to be solved quicker, and alleviating the feeling students have that advisors are useless. Almost every single one of FIU’s mission statements focuses on student excellence, improving the academic advising system so it can be better than any other university would further contribute to that goal.
DISCLAIMER:
The opinions presented on this page do not represent the views of the PantherNOW Editorial Board. These views are separate from editorials and reflect the perspectives of contributing writers and/or university community members.
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