Thursday, June 13, 2013

Vera in Van Wert Sends In This Week's Big Thirsty On Advising.

I've been doing some summer advising at my SLAC -- undecided freshmen. Some seem stressed out about picking a major (and thus, in their mind, a career). I told them that undecided was fine -- even preferable! Focus on the course work and getting to know our wonderful faculty, I said, by the end of their first year you'll have a much better sense of what you enjoy and where your talents lie. When I tried to probe my new advisees about what fields might interest them, what courses they wanted to try out, all of them responded the same way: "Rodent Management."

Sigh.

I asked them why they were considering rodent management and none had a particularly good answer. They mostly just shrugged and mumbled something about jobs. Now, rodent management is a fine program at my SLAC. But in these cases, the potential RM majors don't seem to have any particularly good reason for choosing RM (or even a good grasp of what an RM degree consists of) except that it perhaps sounds practical, responsible, and achievable. In reality, our SLAC's RM grads don't do any better on the job market than other majors.

I admit, it made my hamster studies heart glum.

Q: How do you advise undecided students? I'm not looking to convert anyone -- if they really want to study rodent management or anything else, that's fine with me. But I don't want them to slouch into it, so to speak.

-- Vera in Van Wert

15 comments:

  1. There are few undecided students at BSU. All students MUST declare a major on admission, after which they are assigned to an advisor in that major. And as of this year, students may not change their declared major after their sophomore year. BSU calls this "student success" because it fast-tracks them to graduation. At BSU, we don't care what you study or how much you learn; we only care about how quickly we get you the f**k out of here. Succeed quickly, kiddos.

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  2. At my undergrad institution, my grad institution, where I taught last, and where I'm teaching now, I've detected a common trend - that there's a step JUST past "undecided," called "majoring in psychology."

    Now, I know some people REALLY major in psychology. I know some who clearly want to work in the field and so on. But the number of freshmen I've met who have only the dimmest idea of what is actually involved in a psych major but who have chosen it anyway... and never mind the legions of FORMER psych majors...

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    1. Ha! That was me. I had a passion but not the guts to defy my parents and go out on my own to pursue it, so I majored in psychology. My parents seemed relieved, and I got me a degree and took me a GRE, and then when I found something that did interest me, those pieces of paper were essential for getting into graduate school in a different field.

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    2. It's communications at my school (with the same caveat about there being real communications majors, too). Of course, the aspects of communication that attract the undecided types may be somewhat similar to the aspects of psychology that attract the undecided types (they get to talk about relationships, especially romantic ones, with a secondary chance to figure out the dynamics of their families of origin).

      That's probably the female version of the phenomenon. The guys are just hoping to be sportscasters (or sports promoters, but I think that might be "sports management," which is a real major, but not, oddly, one based in the b-school, at least as far as I can tell. I think the b-school wants too much math. What the sports management students actually study, I'm not really sure).

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  3. At my school, I seem to advise students who are only undecided about whether to stay in college or not. Often in these discussions, my personal advice for the student cuts against the institution's preferred wishes.

    One of my students didn't know what he wanted to major in. That was ok because his GPA was 0.8, so it's not as if Intel was waiting impatiently for him. His parents insisted that he simply needed to focus on his future career and his stupidity would take care of itself, or something like that. He took some career placement test that determined that he liked playing video games.

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  4. Our students are forced into majors so early that I never see an actual "undecided," though many of them are just that.

    As an English prof, I hardly ever have to worry about students wanting to switch to my major.

    "Look at my car," I say, "and then decide."

    They usually stroll across the quad to the Business building.

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  5. I tell them that after they graduate their major won't mean a damn thing, that employers will look at the skills they have. The subject I teach is on of those commonly looked down on a "what can you do with a degree in X except teach X?" Our majors write more than those in any other department, even those in English. Moreover, our department alum all report that they were more prepared for the work world by knowing how to write a coherent report than any other skill they learned in college.

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    1. Amen. Lists of top ten skills employers look for usually include "communication". When I tell students that this means "writing," they fidget. And fidget they should.

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    2. I get the same reaction when I tell students that I spend most of my time writing, not working in the lab. That makes them even less motivated to get into science. I didn't think that was possible.

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    3. I get the feeling we're in the same field, MA&M. But, yeah, whenever I stress the importance of reading and writing in professional life, they all look like I just told them that getting barium enemas was super-important for life beyond college.

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  6. When I advise I really try to listen. I used to be guilty of indoctrination and I think I did a lousy job of trying to turn students on to what I loved.

    You have to simply ask good questions about their interest, their aptitude(s), and their longterm goals about money and location.

    They don't KNOW all of this stuff, but at least get them thinking about it.

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    1. I don't advise students, but I've had reasonable luck with this approach when trying to help some of the especially apparently-dull ones choose research topics. If you start asking about experiences outside the academy (especially paid and volunteer jobs), it often turns out that there's *something* that makes them light up (and more than occasionally it turns out to be something pretty socially useful, like figuring out how to make the lives of nursing home residents and/or workers better).

      Some of them really are dull and apathetic. Some of them just seem to turn into deer in the headlights when faced with academic situations involving choice, individual initiative, etc., etc.

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  7. I'm a rodent management proffie and suffer from the influx of all those undecideds who think a degree in my field is a ticket to a post-college job -- but who have not a shred of the abilities required to do well in the major. When I see them swarming in to declare the major, I have two bits of advice: (1) it won't guarantee you a job and (2) it's going to be more challenging than you think (i.e. "life experience" is pretty much useless in getting through the required courses). They still swarm. Sigh.

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  8. I try not to advise them too early on but to instead listen to what they're saying and ask them to take a bunch of general courses that help them to develop their critical thinking skills so they can make better decisions about their lives... and then I ask them to get back to me at the end of the quarter or the end of the year. Since I'm at a SLAC, they have a shit ton of GE courses that can keep them busy for two years before they ever even take a major course.

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  9. Show them the way to the business school. That is where they're asking directions for, isn't it?

    I often want to advise students who don't know what to do with their lives, don't want to be in college, and lack the imagination to major in anything other than what they've been told to major in to take a break from college, and either work in an unglamorous job such as fast food, or do a stint in the military. The problem with this is that this isn't what they're asking you to do for them: they want to know the way to the business school. If you try telling them to take a break from college, it'll likely be interpreted as meddling, or even attempting to poach students for your own program. Henry Luce could get away with messianism, but times have changed. Sadly, college used to be considered a great place to find yourself, but it's become a bit expensive for that.

    Whatever you do, please don't send them to the physics department. But then, we've long poached students from the engineering school, and our medical physics program is now poaching them from bio.

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