Quality of Advisor/Advisee Relationships
Quality of Advisor/Advisee Relationships
Background:
Representatives from HCSA reported back that students were having issues with their advisors. They brought forth the following issues:
- Never actually meeting their advisor
- Having issues getting in touch with their advisor
- Feeling like their advisor was not able to help them
- Concerned that the advisor did not know what advising actually means
- Confusion about their role as advisors
As a result, HCSA produced a survey to see find out what the general population though about their Advisor/Advisee relationships
Results:
62 students chose to respond to the survey posted on Facebook through Qualtrics. The complete results are included on the back of this report.
Quality, Effectiveness and Satisfaction:
The results revealed that the students are very split on the quality of their advisors. For example, when asked if the respondent had a strong relationship with their advisor, 47% believed that they either somewhat or strong disagree, and 44% believed that they either somewhat or strongly disagreed. Interestingly, while these two are nearly evenly split, fewer students strongly agree that they have a strong relationship (16%) than those who strongly disagree (27%).
Conversely, when asked if students are satisfied with the relationship with their advisor, 37% say they are somewhat or extremely dissatisfied, and 47% said they are somewhat or extremely satisfied.
As for effectiveness, the results form a rough normal distribution, implying that most individuals are indifferent on the effectiveness of advising.
Availability and Prioritization:
As for being prioritized, individuals are split almost evening across the answer choices, however, strongly agree (30%) and strongly disagree (21%) are more prevalent. However, nearly everyone said that their advisor was approachable. In general, most students only met with their advisors only once a semester (42%) or once a quarter (26%).
Some of the main findings were that most respondents met with their advisor just once a quarter (26%) or once a semester (41%).
Solutions:
A slight majority of students believed that their advisors would definitely or probably benefit from training or resources (46%), while most students either agreed or somewhat agreed that advisors should be evaluated in some way on his/her advising ability (54%, with 26% neither agreeing or disagreeing).
A variety of qualitative responses are also included on the back of this report.
Conclusions:
Students appear to be split on their responses about advising. As advising is an essential part of our experience here at Harvard Chan, we should thrive to have all students reporting positively about their advising experience. Fortunately, it looks like some advisors are going above and beyond, and could potentially mentor new advisors to be successful, along with the other solutions mentioned.