That Point in the Semester

We’ve reached that point of the semester where all you can do is try to keep up.

The first two or three weeks of the semester are hellaciously busy for advisors. Students are coming in to get their classes straightened out – adding things, dropping things, trying to decide whether to do either of those things. They need to make sure their financial aid is straightened out, which has been a nightmare the last couple of years with all the changes made to the FAFSA and the deliberate underfunding of grant aid by state governments. They need to make sure their bill is paid. They need to know how to pay these bills, a Byzantine process with more options than are probably healthy. They need to get the hang of being in college in general, which is not as straightforward as people think. College is an artificial environment and it’s hard to explain if you haven’t been through it. There are a lot of unwritten rules and cultural assumptions and part of being an advisor is helping students navigate through that. It hits hard in the first couple of weeks.

Things calm down for advisors a bit after that, but for faculty that’s when it all starts to ramp up. You’re through the introductory material by then and heading into the heart of the syllabus where things get more complicated and more challenging for both students and professors. Assignments are coming in that need to be graded and if you are basing your assignments on when they naturally fall in the sequence of the material covered (as opposed to, say, trying to spread them out across the calendar to ease your workload) you may find yourself giving exams in every single class you teach in the same week. That’s just how it works out. Have fun grading it all at once. Meanwhile the administration is peppering you with requests for progress reports, alerts, and other such bureaucracy designed to increase student retention so the advisors can reach out to the students who need help and you know that this is important but it is another task on an already large and growing pile.

Then advising gets busy again. Students have a few grades back to them and they’re panicking about some of their classes – sometimes justifiably so – and you have to figure out whether to encourage them to persevere (“This is salvageable if you can do X, Y, and Z”) or cut their losses (“We have a form for just this situation”). You also have to reassure them that this is normal, that setbacks happen, that they can certainly move forward from here, and if they do find themselves in a worst-case scenario where everything collapses around them anyway that college is not a one-and-done experience and they can always come back. There’s a reason we have forms for those situations, after all. There’s also a reason that GPAs tend to rise over time – not because anyone gets smarter, but because students figure out how the place works.

It's a back and forth pendulum of frantic activity.

And if your job entails both advising and faculty duties, well, the busy never ends. It just switches from one to the other depending on what you want to focus on today.

The students are in the same boat, by the way, which is why in my First Year Seminar classes I always schedule the mental health and wellness unit for mid-October. This is about the point in the semester when we start losing people.

Somewhere in there one must eat, sleep, and occasionally do something that isn’t related to any of this because if you don’t take breaks now and then you will eventually stop functioning at all. Fitting these things in can be a puzzle.

We press on.