Peer Advisors Replace Prefects

As of next fall, freshmen will receive academic advice from upperclassmen who will also fulfill the function of prefects, Associate Dean of Advising Programs Monique M. Rinere announced yesterday in a press release.

The changes come at the forefront of an overhaul of the advising system as recommended in the ongoing curricular review.

The peer advising fellows will receive a stipend of $1000 for the academic year, the press release said. Freshmen, sophomores, and juniors can apply to be among the College’s first 180 peer advising fellows.

The College administration has said it will fund the program from its own budget.

“This is a priority for the College, and I will find the money in next year’s budget,” Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 wrote in an e-mail.

The program was designed by the Advising Programs Office (APO) and a subcommittee of the Student Advisory Board (SAB).

Under the new program, fellows will be matched with a group of around 10 freshmen, who will come from a pool of 80 to 150 students in a “single larger dorm or group of smaller dorms,” according to the APO website.

Fellows will be “assigned across entryways and in some cases across dorms,” said Lindsay C. Page, proctor adviser to the Prefect Program and a member of SAB’s Peer Advising Committee.

Peer advisers will be assigned advisees based on broad academic interests, Rinere said in the press release. Peer advisers would be expected to meet their advisee group weekly and to offer extracurricular, academic, and college-life advice, the press release said.

Peer advising fellows will also “fill the traditional role of prefects,” Page said.

While “the primary role of each Fellow will be to help their advisee group navigate the freshman year,” peer advisers “will also be affiliated with a specific entryway group, and will attend some of the entryway events,” the APO website reads.

“The idea is to continue the important work the prefects have done while adding on an advising program,” said Page, citing “community building” as a facet of the Prefect Program.

This increased commitment is partly why peer advising fellows, unlike their prefect predecessors, will be paid, Page said. According to the APO website, students will be expected to devote around 40 hours a semester to this role.

“It’s a serious commitment of time, and we didn’t want that to stand in the way of any students who have jobs on campus,” Page said.

But members of the Prefect Program said yesterday that they were concerned that the peer advising fellows program would still leave certain prefect functions unfulfilled.

While all Prefect Program board members sit on the SAB, only two of the seven are on the peer advising subcommittee. Subcommittee members were ultimately responsible for issuing the recommendations to the new peer advising system. But all members of SAB voted on whether these new peer advisers should be called prefects, peer advisers, or peer advising fellows, said one SAB member.

The curricular review’s Report on Advising and Counseling, released in December, calls for the institution of peer advisers that would “replace and augment the integration and introductory function performed by participants in such existing programs as the Prefect Program.”

Rinere did not respond to a request for comment.

—Staff writer Nina L. Vizcarrondo can be reached at nvizcarr@fas.harvard.edu.