It's Time to Rethink the Faculty Advisory System!
 
By Kim Hee-jin, Guest Reporter
 
When you entered university as a freshman, you might have needed time and effort to adapt yourself to your new surroundings. It is a natural phenomenon because the change is too radical - you suddenly have a lot of free time compared to high-school. Chonnam National University operates many programs to help students adapt to their new environment by giving them help and advice. One of them is the Faculty Advisory System. The aim of the program is for a faculty adviser, who is appointed to individual students, to meet with students periodically and counsel them on their campus life and future careers. However, I am not sure whether this system works well.
From my experience, I only had two chances to meet my adviser in the course of a year. Even in the meetings I could not talk with my adviser because there were 8~9 students in addition to me and the atmosphere was formal and unfamiliar. Those two meetings made my friends and I disappointed with the system. And as time went by, no one expected to get good help and advice from the system. I find the present system is quite similar with the situation of our high school days, when we met home our room teachers every year. At that time we expected them to take care of us and give us some help and advice. However, most of them did not, and also each student gained different results depending on what their home room teacher thought of his/her role. Such problems happened in the careers master system.
Therefore, I think the present faculty advisory system is not effective for most students. If it keeps working as it is, a few students will get benefits but most will get dissatisfaction from it. It is unfair and nobody wants such results. The authorities have to improve the system as soon as possible. From now, they try to fix its problems. For example, they can reduce the number of students per professor and prepare mandatory courses to manage this system and create greater consistency among faculty advisers. Fortunately, we know what is wrong so we can make it better. If we do our best I am sure the faculty advisory system will work well and meet its original aim.
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