Academic advising week begins a week from Monday, offering every student a booked 20-minute session with an advising staff member to review subject choices, workload and plans beyond MU. Booking opens Wednesday in the student portal and, if previous years hold, the late-afternoon slots will be gone by Thursday.
Advisers consistently say the sessions that help most are the prepared ones. “Twenty minutes is plenty for a student who arrives with questions,” said advising coordinator Sarah Lindqvist. “It is nothing for a student who arrives hoping I will ask them.”
What to bring
- Your current subject list and any you are considering dropping or adding
- Honest notes on which subjects are consuming the most time
- One question about the year after this one — even a vague one
- Anything a teacher has told you that you want a second opinion on
Common session topics
The office’s own records from last year show the most common topics were elective selection, managing workload across subjects, scholarship planning, and — among seniors — sequencing application deadlines. Sessions are confidential within the advising office.
Students who cannot attend during the scheduled week can request an alternative slot through the same portal form. Advising week sessions replace the usual drop-in hours for that week only.
What advisers wish students knew
Lindqvist offered one addition to the preparation list, drawn from years of sessions: bring the problem you think is too small. “The twenty-minute sessions that change a student’s year are almost never about the dramatic things. They’re ‘I’m spending four hours a night on one subject and I don’t know if that’s normal.’ It isn’t, and it’s fixable, and students sit on it for months because it doesn’t feel important enough for an appointment. It is. That’s what the appointment is for.”
The week also has a quieter second function: it is when the advising office updates its picture of the whole student body, not just the students who seek it out. Patterns spotted across hundreds of sessions — a subject generating unusual workload complaints, a year group under particular pressure — are reported in anonymised form to the staff council, and have previously prompted timetable changes and, two years ago, the first version of the wellness workshop series.
