Every year, after the midterms whirlwind, students scramble to look for classes that fit with their loosely designed majors, meet with their sometimes-absentee advisors and wake up early enough to register. The New School Free Press has compiled this special issue to help you untangle the disparate registration threads and get you to Spring 2016 safely.
The idea for this special issue stemmed from a rumor overheard in the courtyard. A student loudly declared that all of the advisors in the Lang department had been fired. In truth, advisors weren’t fired but three of them did leave TNS for NYU. One of those advisors was Jonathon White.
NSFP reporters canvassed the school to find out what New Schoolers wanted us to cover and we found that most of you had questions about advising and registration. With Jon White’s departure, announced over the summer, students bemoaned the loss of their beloved advisor and wondered who would take care of their last minute advising needs.
Read on for an exclusive interview with Jon White and for a detailing of the nut-and-bolts of the changes the advising department underwent over the summer.
Another big change affecting registration this semester is the redesign of our University Course Catalog. If you were confused about how to find courses using the new system- have no fears we have the answers for you.
Use our “Registration Calculator” to figure out when your registration date and check out our stories on classes at other divisions you may not have noticed or tips on how to balance life, school and internships.
Finally, use the submit button at the bottom of this issue to sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter covering everything you need to know about TNS.
This course would be great for Jazz or Mannes students to take because instead of just being another course where you create music, it may provoke thoughts on how and why it is that music alters the energy and environment around us.
“How Things Work” is offered at Parsons and goes over the principles behind everyday objects like the flashlight, battery operated toothbrushes and the washing machine. Jazz students would enjoy this course because it may make them think about their own instruments and why they are designed the way they are.
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“The Beatles Revolution” is a course offered at Mannes that closely follows the ultra famous English rock group The Beatles. This is a dream course for a Jazz student because it is an ode to musical art. Lang, Parsons and NSSR students will also love this course because let’s be honest, who doesn’t love The Beatles?
Open for writers of all different levels, this course tackles how to write compelling, page turning non-fiction. This course is perfect for Lang students, particularly those interested in creative writing. Lang students might dig taking this course so they can exchange stories with each other in the courtyard or that new coffee/spoken word space in their neighborhoods.
LangIn this course students will look at the dance form known as “Vogue” and its complex social context. The course will take a look at the House and Ballroom scenes, and their relationship with the oppression of racial, sexual and gender minorities. Parsons students may love this course because ballroom culture has broken ground in fashion and design elements. It may even be inspiration to new fashion design ideas!
The story goes that when DVZ came on as president of The New School, he asked for the course catalog. Everyone looked around and sheepishly informed him that there was no physical version of the catalog. In fact, not only was there no physical copy, but online, there were two catalogs. One for Eugene Lang, and one for the rest of the university. (Lang classes were also listed in the university catalog.)
So was born the quest not only to merge the Lang catalog with the rest of the university but also to create a bigger, better searchable database of all university classes. This fall, the catalog makes its debut not to a standing ovation but to a chorus of angry complaints from faculty and students.
Critics say there are problems with the tagging system, that the user-interface has problems that haven’t been worked out yet and that the catalog itself is not up-to-date even though registration is upon us. “The wealth of information [of all the classes the university offers] is obstructed by this horrible database,” David Carroll, professor of Design Technology, said.
According to an email from Anand Padmanabhan, chief information officer at The New School, who oversaw the project, the primary changes from the old catalog to the new are searchability and sort functionality. In the old system, students searched by department, topic, key word, division, or subject code.
Now, you can also search by course availability, day, time, and the dates of courses, as well as location and faculty member, among others. Users of the new system, however, report problems. “Unless you know the exact name of the course you want to take, it’s really hard to find your class,” Nina Lampcov, a junior at Lang, said.
For example, a search for “news” and “narrative” brings up zero results, while a search for “news, narrative” brings up all three levels of News, Narrative & Design. But should a single comma make such a difference?
“The site is making lots of assumptions about the user,” Carroll said. “It assumes that people know what to search for. It assumes that people have a preexisting understanding of the hierarchy of the university.”
Carroll and others are quick to point out, however, that some of these issues may be the result of a cultural problem. For example, the department chairs and others responsible for providing class information may not know or aren’t getting training for how to create meta tags.“There’s not even a methodology that’s consistent and rational,” Carroll said, “and nobody knows or appreciates how important it [tagging] really is.”
Margot Bouman, interim chair of the visual studies department and co-director of the gender and sexuality department, said faculty are sometimes actually resistant to tagging their courses.“The course catalog is more a picture of compliance than a clear picture of what courses are offered in the university,” she said.
The other issue is whether the catalog is ready for prime time. As of press time, the NSFP was unable to determine why exactly there appear to be missing courses and departments. But on Friday, a search for the keyword “Anthropology” results in 27 findings on the new course catalog and 48 on the old one. The Journalism + Design department isn’t even listed in the department menu.
Carroll ultimately felt that the new catalog was a bit of a missed opportunity. “Ultimately, [this site] is probably not the way students want to plan their courses,” Carroll said. “We need to identify what needs need to be satisfied.”
Carroll believes in the idea of a university course catalog and applauds the effort, but feels a more intuitive, people-centered approach would be in the best interest of the students and professors. He imagines a system where all students and professors upload a CV of sorts and a program would then match them up, giving students a first draft of a schedule that takes into account preferences and requirements.
With registration upon us, Lang students are scrambling to meet with their advisors about spring 2016 courses. (Cue the tears, hair-pulling anxiety, and maybe even stress dreams about picking the right classes.) We’ve all been there.
And guess what? In a few more months, we’ll all be doing it again. (Cue gasps of horror and screams of pain.) Meeting with your advisor can feel like the most difficult part of the whole thing. It can get complicated and frustrating. You may even consider dropping out of school to work full-time at the coffee shop job where your boss has been nagging you to pick up more hours.
But fears be gone! We met with students and heard their worst advising stories, and then went to advising to find out why things go wrong and how they can go smoother.
“Advising at The New School is super impersonal and the advisors don’t know you outside of what a computer tells them, which is basically the opposite of what the classes are like.”
“I pay for this school. I feel like I should have someone to actually advise me and not feel like I’m burdening them.”
“I made a mistake that could have been solved quite easily if given just a modicum of the proper attention.”
Tensions have risen between Lang faculty and university administrators this semester over changes to how academic advising is run in the wake of a long-serving administrator leaving the college in July.
In e-mails and in open meetings, faculty have expressed their frustrations to the central administration over how the university is implementing the twenty-month old plan to house more of advising under the control of the central administration rather than within Lang college.
The university is in the midst of a complex bureaucratic reshuffling, dubbed “centralization,” that was first outlined in a February, 2014 strategic plan. In President Van Zandt’s vision of the school, central administrators have more to say over students’ academic careers than those in the college so students could, for example, take music theory classes in Mannes as easily as they take literary theory classes at Lang. But while the plan is nothing new, Lang’s faculty advisors have complained that the way the broader university has taken control hasn’t been effective and left them handling a backlog of hundreds of student e-mails.
The issue of advising has been a significant one for the Lang Faculty Council, which devoted part of its September meeting to discussing ways the university is handling it, according to the meeting’s agenda.
Professor Robert Buchanan of The New School, takes a moment to joke with students during his boat making class on Pier 40.
“I think whatever we did was disregarded and ignored,” Rob Buchanan, an assistant professor and critic of the university's shift, told the Free Press. Buchanan added that a sub-committee of faculty across the university had submitted their own plans but hadn’t heard anything back from administrators.
The contrast between the old and new ways of advising is perhaps most stark in the July departure of Jon White, previously the Associate Dean of Student Affairs at Lang.
“My vision for The New School was not their vision for The New School,” White told the Free Press during a recent interview.
Before these changes, seven staff members reported to White, who then reported to the Lang Dean Stephanie Browner, White said. The program was structured so White’s staff handled students by their year, and Jon directed the program. For instance, the advisor for first-years also oversaw peer advising, the third-year advisor handled the study-abroad program, and the senior advisor looked after internships. “This particular model enabled advising practices to be informed by co-curricular programs, and likewise co-curricular engagements to be informed by advising knowledge,” White explained.
Former New School advisor Jonathon White in his NYU office on Broadway.
But now that has all changed. Some of advising is run out of 2 West 13th Street, at Parsons instead of 64 West 11th Street. According to Jon White, the Lang advising staff is overseen by Leah Weich, Director of Academic Advising and Student Support. But now, “all administrative staff,” White said, reports to Antoinette Curl, Senior Director of Academic Advising. Curl reports to Michelle Reyla, the Vice President for Student Success, followed by her supervisor, the Chief Success & Enrollment Officer, Donald Resnick.
“All administrative staff had their reporting structure (and associated funding) centralized,” Jon White said in a follow up e-mail.
But administrators have downplayed changes.
“The structure is still the same, they [academic advisors] report to me,” Curl told the Free Press. “The associate dean of students position is a little bit different than it was before...It’s not necessarily a new system. Academic advising is still happening in the same ways it happened before.”
Curl said Lang students are still assigned a primary faculty advisor, who helps them understand the Lang curriculum.
Nonetheless, faculty advisors protested the change and raised questions about what the new structure would look like, how many professional advisors Lang would retain, and what kind of faculty inclusion would relate both directly and indirectly to academic advising, according to an email summarizing the meeting that was reviewed by the Free Press.
The effect is that advising for Lang students has been moved to the central administration. This plan aims to increase Lang’s retention rates and to improve student success post-graduation according to March 12, 2015 PowerPoint presentation by Curl that was presented to Lang faculty, and was later obtained by the Free Press.
“We will become a more student‐centered university; academically rigorous and focused on outcomes; with strong, integrated support services, especially advising and career services,” according to the strategic plan, which was approved by the board of trustees.
While faculty expressed frustration that their input on advising hasn’t been heard, Curl said that she had listened to their complaints.
Students have also expressed concerns about advising.
The NSFP conducted an anonymous unscientific poll to suss out student reaction. “Some faculty advisors have been extremely unhelpful,” one respondent said. “One even messaged me to tell me that they won't be advising this semester, even though the school keeps sending me e-mails to meet with them if I want. Other advisors have been more helpful over e-mail and in person, but it is very unlikely that there will be someone who knows you as a student, tracks your academic progress and develops a relationship with you.”
A reason for this could be because after the restructuring two advisors, Candace Sumner-Robinson and Molly Rottman, both left The New School earlier this semester. They have since been replaced. Due to the understaffing, when the school year started, three advisors were doing the work of six, according to an internal e-mail that was reviewed by the Free Press.
Curl acknowledged that the university is still in the process of implementing the changes to advising, including the widespread adoption of Successlink, a career services program, and Starfish, an appointment calendar program. "Students shouldn't notice any big changes right away," Curl said in the follow-up e-mail, "but over time, they'll see incremental improvements that will benefit their experiences with advising."
Though the loss of Jon White is still felt amongst students.
“I've been exclusively seeing Jon White because of the complex nature of my program,” a triple major BA/BFA student said in response to the Free Press poll. “Nobody has been able to help me out as much as he had,” another student explained.
Taking physical care of yourself is the foundation to a better lifestyle. As a college student, healthy eating can undoubtedly be halted by a budget or by lack of time. Luckily, there is a solution. Set aside an hour a week to pay a visit to your local Trader Joe’s to pick up inexpensive, healthy grocery options. Trader Joe’s offer cheap prices on produce and ready to eat meals; pick up bananas for vitamin-B to lessen stress, eggs as a source of choline to enhance memory and reaction time, salmon’s omega-3 fatty acids to improve focus, and nuts to give you that extra energy boost. Need help easing into a healthier lifestyle? The New School offers nutrition counseling sessions to help you find a better balanced diet.
This one is for all you fellow perfectionists. It’s impossible to be on top of your work, juggle a 2-3 day internship, and work a part time job on top of having a successful social life and a healthy sleep schedule. It’s something that you have to accept. "There's a difference between excellence and perfection," explains Miriam Adderholdt, a psychology instructor and author of Perfectionism: What's Bad About Being Too Good?. “Excellence involves enjoying what you're doing, feeling good about what you've learned, and developing confidence. Perfection involves feeling bad about a 98 and always finding mistakes no matter how well you're doing.” Feeling down? The New School offers individual mindfulness practice sessions which offers techniques on how to solve problems and manage stress. More info under mindfulness practice here.
Your mental state is just as important as your physical one. According to the National Sleep Foundation, young adults between the ages of 18-25 are recommended 7-9 hours of sleep per night. Can’t fill the requirement? PhD sleep expert Sara C. Mednick recommends taking 15-20 minute power naps to increase your alertness and get that extra energy boost.
Do you really go to The New School if you don’t own a moleskine planner? But in all seriousness, these aesthetically pleasing leather planners will become your best friend. If you maximize and organize your time to the best of your abilities, you might not have to miss out on anything. Having a busier schedule can surprisingly help organize you even more. Since your weekly commitments are already planned out, you know that you only have a certain time slot to do that assignment, or fit in a workout; therefore, procrastination is less of an option. Having trouble planning your time effectively? Time management workshops are provided by The New School.
After the late nights spent in the library, that non-paid 9-5 internship, and missing out on fun because you need to make that extra cash — remember that it’s all going to be worth it. All of your time spent working is ultimately going to get you to the place you want to be. We’ve all been in a situation where we question if going to that party and missing our early morning class the next day is worth it; more often than not, it isn’t. If you put in the work to succeed, you will see the results over time. Remember that success will never be given to you, but the opportunity to obtain it will always be.
A special thank you to New School alumni, Alexandra Ackerman and Kevin Dugan for sharing their expertise in web development and reporting. Alexandra is currently a web developer at Contently.com; you can take a look at her work here. Kevin is currently a Wall Street reporter for the New York Post; you can read some of his work here.