he LS&A Academic Advising Center in 1255 Angell Hall is a welcoming place. It is brightly lit, with a spacious reception area serving as the hub for a number of individual advising offices. The office is very busy—for this is a place where much of the business of forging a liberal arts education is accomplished—without being frantic.

The Center's staff of 29 professional and faculty academic advisors serves over 14,900 LS&A undergraduates through individual appointments, the Internet and the telephone. A recent reorganization into subunits—First-Year Advising, Upper-level Advising and Senior Services—is intended to improve services to students.

"I am here simply to respond to whatever students come in with," said academic advisor Tom Collier, who is also a lecturer who teaches very popular courses on military history. Collier, who has been an LS&A academic advisor since 1981, observes that students "have all kinds of different questions, depending on the stages that the students are in. First-year students just want to know, 'What courses should I take next term?' Then the question a little later becomes, 'What do I want to specialize in? What are the possibilities for specializing?' Then a little later it becomes things like double concentrations, study abroad or switching to another college or school of this university or even to another institution. And then finally it's, 'What do I have to do to graduate?'

The advisors' job is to suggest answers, lead students to provide their own answers or steer them somewhere else where they can get the right answers, Collier said. Although he is one of only five of the 29 academic advisors now teaching at U-M, all have college teaching experience. Collier considers them "the most ardent advocates of liberal arts on campus."

In addition to working in the Center, some advisors maintain regular office hours in residence halls. "The residence hall population is largely freshmen and sophomores," said Virginia Reese, associate director for first-year advising. "The nature of the conversations can be quite different" in the residence halls, she says, because students are less intimidated on their home ground and also more likely to come in with a pressing question without waiting for an official appointment.

Part of the effort to improve academic advising includes giving first-year students the opportunity to meet with an academic advisor three times during orientation. First-year student Jacqui Minns of West Bloomfield, Michigan, said that although she hasn't seen her advisor since orientation, she has kept in contact with him through e-mail. "If I did have a problem, I would not be hesitant to see my advisor," she added. David Valazzi of Mahwah, New Jersey, confessed, "I unfortunately didn't use an advisor as much as I should have in my freshman year and now have come to regret it. But now, as a junior, I keep in touch with my advisor through e-mail quite often."

The Internet has been a tremendous boon to the LS&A advising system. Advisors can quickly relay information to groups of advisees or communicate with individual advisees. Students can read the messages and respond at their convenience. Moreover, e-mail allows students to ask questions that are important to them but do not warrant a 30-minute appointment, and to ask those questions right while they are thinking about them.

The Center also has an e-mail address for students who may not have a specific advisor, or for students studying abroad. It also maintains a Web site at http://www.lsa.umich.edu/saa/ where students can access current information regarding the Center, the academic calendar, degree requirements, course descriptions, available classes and special academic opportunities such as study abroad and scholarships.

Of course, e-mail contact does not replace individual appointments. Assistant Dean for Student Academic Affairs Esrold Nurse observed that the Internet is not "a substitute for the individual contact that I think you want to have with students, because on the Web the advisor can't ask the next question, while in an individual meeting, you can say, 'O.K., we can deal with this, but why are you doing it?' That can lead to another solution that we can't get at on the Web."

Many students enter LS&A with a particular goal in mind, whether it is to get into medical school or simply to graduate with a good job. The challenge for advisors is to convince students (and their parents) that they are also in LS&A to explore—to explore the liberal arts, the possibilities offered by the University, and themselves.

Nichole Argyres graduated from LS&A last year with honors in English language and literature. As an undergraduate, she often consulted her premed advisor, Penelope Morris, who now works for the Medical School. "She was wonderful," raved Argyres. "Part of her job was to make sure you don't go to med school just because you think you should. The premed advisor helps students identify subjects to fall back on that you like, enjoy and are good at."

After graduation, Argyres joined the Center as an advisor. She said that she felt freer in college when she no longer had to identify herself under a single label like "premed."

"Although parents are concerned about jobs," she added, "a liberal arts education is not about a job, but about [acquiring] marketable skills."

In Morris's view, "A very important element in advising is to help students learn to value their education in and of itself, to value personal growth and the development of their abilities to read, research, write and think more deeply. Sometimes it's a struggle to convince people of that, especially parents."

When students question whether they wish to continue pursuing a goal in a highly competitive field, an advisor should not say, "These are the parameters and it doesn't look as if you're going to make it," Morris said. "Besides, I've seen many who didn't meet pre-med requirements in college come back, satisfy them and become physicians. The main thing is to help them discover for themselves what they want to do."

Psychology major Joyce Ellen Heyman '97 of Highland Park, Illinois, said that she and advisor Tom Collier "often discussed both the philosophy and the application of the liberal arts education. I wouldn't attribute my successes here to academic advising, but perhaps my peace of mind."

Eva Rosenn is a freelance writer who lives in Ann Arbor.

Photo by Bob Kalmbach