As a result of an extensive internal evaluation conducted in response to recent changes in residential life, the Freshman Advisory Counselor program will be dramatically restructured for next year.
The most significant change to be phased in over the next two years will be the selection of all counselors from the sophomore class. Currently, counselors are selected from the sophomore, junior and senior classes. The rationale behind the change is that sophomores will be more closely connected with the all-freshman East Campus experience than upperclassmen will, said Julie Ritter, immediate past-chair of the FAC Board.
"One thing that we wanted to do was to make the program a sophomore leadership experience," Ritter said. She added that the sophomore FACs will be assigned to their former freshman dorms, creating a greater sense of unity among all FACs involved because they will have lived together as freshmen.
To recognize the contribution that sophomores and juniors are currently making as counselors, Ritter said that anyone who served as a FAC this year will continue to be eligible to apply for a FAC position until they graduate. "After two years, it will all be sophomores," she said.
Marta Perez, assistant dean of student development and adviser to the FAC program, said that in order not to lose upperclassmen's valuable knowledge and experience, program officials will appoint juniors and seniors to the FAC board to serve as head FACs for each freshman dorm.
"Head FACs are going to be a lot more involved with FACs and FAClets and be much more available," Perez said. She said that sophomore FACs will hold meetings with their head FACs once every two weeks through fall break, and will then hold two meetings at some point during the remainder of the fall semester.
Head FACs will also play a significant role in evaluating the performance of sophomore FACs to help select head FACs for the following year. Since head FACs are automatically members of the FAC Board, Perez said she expects the size of the board to increase to about 40 people.
Since that number is too large for an effective decision-making process, Perez said that one head FAC from each freshman dorm would be selected to serve on the executive council along with the newly elected FAC Board chairs, who are Trinity juniors Mandy Stenger and Liz Osterwise.
The FAC Board is currently in the process of interviewing for open board positions, and will be accepting applications from potential FACs until the end of today. Although there was some debate in the past as to whether FAC groups should be coed, the pairings for next year and in the future will stick to the traditional same sex groups paired with an opposite sex FAC.
An area also covered by the internal evaluation, but not yet completed, is the training program for new FACs. Linda Studer-Ellis, assistant dean of student development and head of the training committee, said that right now they are still in the beginning stages of their evaluation since implementation does not need to begin until the fall.
"We have reviewed the needs of first-year students and determined the knowledge and skills that FACs need to meet those needs," Studer-Ellis said. She added that the next step will be to prioritize those skills and figure out how to pass them along to new FACs.
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