I am part of a group of faculty (the advising cadre) who work in Counseling and Advising during the summer and winter to help with registration. And for the most part, it's a great experience--I get to help students plan their studies, and more often than not, they thank me.
Yesterday, however, I worked with a student who frustrated me just as much I seemed to be frustrating her. She wanted to know if she had to take a placement test to take a writing course. Which course? She wouldn't tell me. Was she working on a degree? That's what I should have known. Was she new to college? No, but she didn't want to talk about that now. Okay, did she have a transcript? Well, she'd just turned it in, so it hadn't been posted and we couldn't see it. Could she bring in an unofficial transcript? No.
I tried to explain that I wanted to see if she'd taken freshman comp somewhere else and that it was a pretty generic course. She assured me that not every college or university used the terminology of"freshman comp." True, I said, pointing out the example of Georgetown's English offerings, but that I still wanted to ascertain whether or not she would have to take a placement test. Well, it wouldn't have been a course called "freshMAN comp" that she'd taken--she was a Women's Studies major.
And then she said that I wasn't listening to her and that she felt very frustrated. I looked at her and said that I felt the same way because she kept interrupting me when I tried to explain things to her.
I'll admit that I felt frustrated, and when she left in angry tears, I felt too wound up to talk to the next student before I spoke with another advisor. But I felt good, too, for being honest with her and not being overly empathic. There's a boundary there that needs tending.
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