Student Council stopped accepting applications for its new advising initiative ULink Friday.
Student Council appointed third-year Daniel Rosenfeld and first-year Jason Carrier, both College students, as ULink Co-Chairs for the program’s first year.
“ULink is a new initiative by Student Council to create a peer academic advising program for students who wouldn’t already have peer mentors,” Rosenfeld said.
The program is intended to provide students with a peer advisor who can help them in ways that a faculty advisor could not.
The program aims to recruit students open to helping other students — “somebody that can help you on a more personal level with classes they may have taken,” Carrier said. “A faculty advisor isn’t going to tell you how good or bad a teacher is, or how hard a class is, but a peer advisor is someone with the personal experience to actually provide you with advice that a faculty advisor just cannot give.”
Carrier said they received 78 applications for 5 Vice Chair spots, about 60 applications for coordinator spots and about 260 applications for advisors.
“We’re selecting about 50 or so from the College, and about 25 or so from Engineering,” Carrier said. “That number doesn’t include the 25 that we already have from Curry for the Kinesiology program, and we also have about 20 applicants from Nursing, and we will select about 10.”
Rosenfeld said they hope to have the decisions available by Wednesday.
The program will start in the fall of 2014, and will be available to first-year students who indicate their interest in having a peer advisor when filling out their Faculty Advisor Sheet.
“We cannot be big enough the first year to provide every incoming student with an advisor […] but this first year we’re hoping to advise around 700 to 800 students from the incoming first-year class,” Carrier said.
Carrier said advisors will differ across schools.
“We’re going to be able to provide every incoming Kinesiology major with a peer advisor, we’re going to be able to provide every incoming Nursing student with a peer advisor, but we’re only going to be able to provide 500 or so incoming College students with a peer advisor, and about 200 or so incoming Engineers.”
Those selected as advisors will attend a training session right before the beginning of classes in order to gain a better understanding of their school’s requirements and coursework, and also to learn ULink’s advisor Code of Conduct.
“We’re going to have a training day for the advisors in the fall, and then it’s sort of going to be up to the advisors to schedule meetings with their advisees at least before add/drop and before they pick classes for the spring,” Rosenfeld said. “And then meetings will be on sort of an ‘as needed’ basis.”
Carrier said the amount of interest and number of applications is exciting for them and shows ULink has a great deal of support from the student body.
“It’s really cool to see that we’re creating something that the students want,” Carrier said. “It really represents student self-governance, because we’re attempting to be an entirely student-run organization for peer advising.”
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