Teacher-student mentoring session

My school organizes mentoring session once a month for graduate students. Some of them are on expectations while doing your post-graduate (e.g. rules, tips with supervisors, presenting papers) and some are on teaching. I found the last session to be most helpful, which was on dealing with students.

My stats guru is the organizer as the chair for mentoring sessions and he invited four speakers representing the counseling department, students affairs, the undergrad student coordinator and the dean of student facilities. Some of the more interesting things I found during the session was:

• They have facilities for every possible student needs. They are especially sensitive to students who are disabled. The dean for student facilities described how she coordinated a session for a student who was coincidentally deaf and blind!
• Campus life is stressful. An average of 2-3 cases of suicide are reported EVERY WEEK. Wonder what the statistics for our undergraduates are; and if such help are even provided
• Instructors are NOT responsible for solving the student's problems, but ARE responsible for showing the students what help are available on and off campus
• Problems with students are inevitable; you are not expected to know everything but you are required to listen to their side of the story
• Enforcement of rules are explicit and complete. They have a guide for everything regarding student-teacher problems! E.g. If you are caught committing plagiarism, you are required to go to plagiarism school, where you will be taught what is appropriate and what is isn't. How fantastic is that??? Students should also be aware of the rules, as they may be sent to court (i.e. internal university court) if they disobey a certain rule

One very important thing that I noted was that, each and every head of the department present that day had a DOCTORATE degree. I think that should be the way. Administrators may be good at what they do in organizing the process, but to me, in a university setting without the PhD attached to your name, you may not experience things the way an academic does. And I've seen that happen... err.. very rampantly before, especially in the scholarship board. :-P Campus politics and policies on university resources should NOT be mixed but that is idealistic and I guess inevitable. But it's nice to see how things are organized here. What is clear, students are their number one priority, and each setup in the university tries to take that into account, in every possible way.

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