I don’t know about you, but I am completely unprepared to leave the confines of university life. It’s not merely because I don’t want to leave the friends, classes, or parties. It’s that I have no idea where I am going or what I am going to do once I leave. There are many factors that play into this uncertainty. We’re in an economic depression, we all lack the work experience of someone in his or her late twenties or early thirties, our majors prepare us for generalities not specifics, the list goes on. This uncertainty can make you think the super-super seniors have it all figured out; however, this uncertainty doesn’t exist.
Our advising department at N.C. State exists, in mission, for the sole purpose for propelling us through college and beyond. It’s meant to be our rock in this unsteady world. At times it seems that we have more advisers than teachers. You have your major specific advisers, college advisers, career advisers, pre-med advisers, etc. You can keep in contact with an adviser by email, phone, podcasts and even Skype. All advisers are well educated and can help you or direct you in any matter you seek guidance on. Why then does uncertainty run rampant among so many of us if the components of the advising system only have minor flaws? It’s because our system is not idiot-proof.
To idiot-proof a system is not to imply that the user is an idiot, it is to make something so easy to use that one cannot fail. Transportation systems, for the most part, are idiot-proof. Go to an airport anywhere in the U.S. and try to get lost, you just can’t. They line the ceilings with signs and monitors in order to get you going where you should and they restrict access to everywhere you shouldn’t. Our advising system is nothing like this—it’s so easy to get lost.
Discounting the required bi-annual instances where one must meet with their adviser to sign off on your plan of work, there is really no other interaction required or even fostered with advising. In the meetings I have had with my advisers I have never once been asked what I wanted to do in college, much less, and more importantly, what I wanted to do after. Any and all conversations were confined to the acquisition of the most sacred of documents, an N.C. State diploma.
Some may say that it is up to the student to bring up questions concerning one’s present and future in their meetings; however, I completely reject this notion. Most of us are young, dumb and full of rum. That is to say, we simply do not know what to ask, and by the time we think of questions, it’s just too late. We are not the ones with experience in the matters of academia or the job market—the advisers are, or at least should be. They know the questions we should be asking. They know when we should go to the Career Center or meet with pre-med advisers, etc. The responsibility should be on our advisers, the ones with the knowledge to actively propel us forward through the advising system; thus, designing an idiot-proof system would alleviate us from our feelings of uncertainty.
If we have most of the pieces, then why is our system designed so backwards? That’s a matter for another column, but the answer could just be our aims are different. The University aims to have us leave with a diploma; we aim to leave with a future.
