Starting this year, each Hillsdale junior will be encouraged to take a trip to Central Hall to talk with the registrar.
The meetings will be “check up and planning sessions,” as Registrar Doug McArthur calls them, to make sure that students are on track to graduate in terms of credit count and requirements.
“We recognize that very often juniors are making progress on completing their major and we want them to get through their last four semesters well, that’s the real genesis behind it,” McArthur said.
During these meetings, McArthur will look at the students’ audit to make sure they know how many classes they need to take to graduate.
“Sometimes when I’m meeting with a student, I have Mr. McArthur print out an audit,” said Diane Philipp, vice president of student affairs and dean of women. “It’s so visual and so simple to see whether you’re on track and how many credits you need each semester.”
Out of the 393 students who qualify as juniors in terms of credits, only 241 have declared their major- leaving almost 40 percent of the juniors undeclared.
“Declaring will be part of the planning- a junior might not be ready to make a decision, but I want to be able to help them make a good informed decision about the direction they take what efficiencies that can be had,” McArthur said.
These meetings will prevent students from failing to meet graduation requirements because McArthur will be able to catch things, such as a missing class.
“We pay a lot of attention to the freshmen and sophomores, and the seniors get a lot of attention, especially from career services, but it’ll be a good thing to communicate more with the juniors as well, since they’re launching and thinking about life after graduation,” Philipp said.
Two students who said they would have benefited from meeting with the registrar are seniors Emily Whitmer and Rachel Maloley.
Whitmer and Maloley are both music majors- a major that requires a minimum of 40 credit hours. However, they were unaware of the 48 credit rule, which says that students cannot have more than 48 credits in one department count towards the 124 credits needed to graduate.
“On the program evaluation online, it said I only needed 24 credits to graduate, but I didn’t know that about 15 of those couldn’t count towards the 124 to graduate because they went over the cap for music credits,” Whitmer said.
This left Whitmer and Maloley in a predicament where they had to take summer classes and load up on credits both semesters of their senior year.
“I thought we were going to have an easy senior year, but it’s our hardest one yet.” Maloley said.
Philipp said that adviser meetings are vital, but meetings with McArthur would be a great service for the students.
“He’s the keeper of the keys for the diploma, so it’s good for him to review with students as well,” Philipp said.
