Inspired by her experience in her fall Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM) course, Visions of Mortality, but depressed by the course sequence she took during winter and spring quarters, Corina Iacopetti ‘09 recently joined 18 other students on a newly formed IHUM student advisory board.

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Masaru Oka

Students lead section for the Approaching Religion: Tradition, Transformation and the Challenge of the Present IHUM. Student panels are currently evaluating the IHUM, PWR and Undergraduate Advising and Research (UAR) programs.

The University is recruiting students like Iacopetti to sit on student panels that offer feedback on undergraduate programs like IHUM, PWR and Undergraduate Advising and Research (UAR).

“The idea behind it is to make sure that students have a way of sending ideas to the administration of IHUM in addition to course evaluations,” said Dr. Phaedra Bell, the academic research program officer for IHUM.

Sam Dubal ‘08, another member of the IHUM student advisory board, cited a number of issues the students would like to address.

“Our recommendations tend to reflect those that we and other students have about IHUM, ranging from the disparity in the amounts of work between courses to the potential overlap between PWR and IHUM to misleading course descriptions put forth in the prospectus sent to incoming students,” Dubal said.

The student panel worked with humanities faculty to organize an open house in November featuring winter-spring IHUM courses and to design an electronic questionnaire about the IHUM experience.

Iacopetti said the response to the questionnaire was impressive, with almost one-third of upperclassmen responding last fall and 900 of them submitting individual responses. The survey is part of an IHUM self-study conducted by the IHUM governance board, on which Iacopetti also sits as one of two student representatives.

As part of a Faculty-Senate mandate to review IHUM every four years, the study has sought critical student and faculty feedback. While the findings will be released in a few weeks, Dr. Russell Berman, director of IHUM and head of the governance board, said, “it is premature to talk about study findings themselves.”

Aman Kumar ‘09 has been working with Lorraine Sterritt, director of UAR, since he was a freshman. This year he joined the program’s student advisory panel, whose main function is to provide student perspectives on how to better merge undergraduate advising and research.

“The advising system served us well, but we saw ways we could make it better,” he said, speaking on behalf of the UAR student board.

One of the current plans to accomplish this goal is a campaign to increase awareness for incoming freshman with regard to major track requirements so they do not lose their first year as an opportunity to take courses necessary for graduation, Kumar said.

Because students are not always initially paired with an advisor in their area of interest, some miss out on crucial guidance for planning their freshman year courses of study. Kumar also noted the related effort to improve the student-advisor matching process.

While implementing changes can be a slow process, Kumar finds faculty eager for student feedback and, ultimately, has considerable faith in the system.

“Programs designed with student feedback in mind,” he said, “are that much more likely to be used by them.”