|
Home  Developing a Partnership Academics Student Services
Paying for College Student Life Resources |
|
DEVELOPING A PARTNERSHIP During the time that your student attends the University of Chicago, the College’s goal, like yours, will be to promote your student’s growth and success. It is our hope that every student flourishes at Chicago and leaves us, at the end of four years, as an educated, independent, selfconfident adult. We look forward to this partnership with parents. The Parents Handbook describes our roles as resources for students during this joint venture. For parents, the handbook also provides a context for interpreting student life, academic expectations, student services, and University regulations. The directory at the back lists additional sources of information. The academic enterprise is more than four years of reading texts, attending lectures, and exchanging ideas with a distinguished faculty. It is the sum of a student’s life in the College. Vast resources, targeted toward students’ growth and success—intellectually, personally, and socially— support, nurture, and enhance students’ scholarly pursuits. Among these resources, many described later in this handbook, the Office of the Dean of Students in the College is central: a clearinghouse of information, referral, and programming; and, most important, academic advising. Each student is assigned to a professional adviser, a member of the dean of students’ staff, whose primary responsibility is to support the student through the transition to the College and the range of decisions to be made throughout four years. In consultation with their advisers, students discover how to pursue personal interests within the College’s curricular requirements and how to develop a plan of study leading to a degree in a selected major. Advisers and students meet several times during Orientation to prepare for Autumn Quarter registration. In their first year, students meet with advisers at least once each quarter. Upperclass students meet with their advisers annually for a required conference and schedule additional Typically, the same adviser works with a student throughout the student’s four years in the College—monitoring registration, providing information about program and curricular requirements, exploring students’ academic and career interests, and explaining University regulations and procedures. Advisers with specialized expertise offer guidance to students about study abroad, scholarships and fellowships, and careers in law and the health professions. After choosing a major, students also have regular contact with faculty counselors. Advisers get to know students well. And because they also know the curriculum, campus life, and the University’s resources well, they can assist students in navigating the challenges, opportunities, and complexities of life in the College, directly or by referral to appropriate sources of advice and information. It is not uncommon for unpredictable events associated with these four years to require intervention. As needed, advisers direct students to tutors, to the Academic Skills Assessment Program, to the Student Counseling and Resource Service, or to other sources of support to improve academic performance or to resolve personal problems. As appropriate, advisers contact instructors if students face emergencies that impact academic obligations. In summary, advisers serve as student advocates and problem solvers. By forging a close working rapport with students—encouraging them to share information, ask questions, and seek advice—advisers help students shape personally rewarding, academically successful college experiences. No matter how different their backgrounds, Chicago’s students have in common an intense interest in learning. They demand much from themselves, from each other, and from the College. Students begin college with great expectations. Acknowledged or not, however, they are also apprehensive about challenges they cannot anticipate. Indeed, Chicago will test both academic and social skills. Students’ peers will now be their equals. They may receive their first grades of C or take courses in which the test average will be 60 percent. Even as they strive to adapt to powerful academic expectations, students confront major emotional adjustments—assuming responsibility for their day-to-day lives, perhaps for the first time; making new friends; developing adult identities. Parents can support students through these transitions by acknowledging that mastery of the college experience, academically and socially, takes time. Assure your student that they possess the intelligence, character, and strength to succeed and, in time, to feel at home at the University of Chicago. Though the College has many resources for students when college life feels especially daunting to them, none is as important, emotionally, as your sympathetic reassurance. Encourage your student to talk with academic advisers, residence hall staff, and faculty members. Knowing when and how to seek advice fosters maturity. Feeling confident about one’s ability to find, and use, internal and external resources is a major developmental goal for the college years. During this period of rapid developmental change, students face many decisions that will shape their futures. Parents bolster their student’s intellectual growth and social maturation when they are patient and supportive, and when they separate their own aspirations—especially career aspirations—from their student’s journey of discovery and search for personal goals. The college years are an appropriate time to change plans, examine new ideas, explore academic and career goals, and test abilities. Parents who fear that a student will permanently abandon family values may fi nd it useful to think of the college years as a time when students try out new ways of being, like actors trying out a succession of roles. Parents who keep a sense of humor, while reassuring and encouraging their student, will likely fi nd that the person who emerges into adulthood remains the person they loved and nurtured through childhood. COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THE COLLEGE AND PARENTS Communication between the College and parents is complicated because, for the most part, the College is bound to keep student information confidential. The College considers students to be responsible, young adults. Conversations between advisers and students are confidential and cannot be shared with parents without students’ permission. Parents who want to know how their student is doing are encouraged to ask their son or daughter directly. As a rule, advisers notify students when they have communicated with parents. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) dictates that the College must have a student’s written consent to release information from the student’s educational record. Exceptions to this requirement include the release of information to other school officials who have a legitimate educational interest in the information, and “to parents of an eligible student who claim the student as dependent for tax purposes.” The College may also notify parents if the College is aware of a health or safety concern that poses a significant danger to the student or to others. With these restrictions in mind, the College will release the following information to parents or guardians who claim their students as dependents for tax purposes. The College may notify these parents or guardians when there is a change in a student’s status (e.g., being placed on academic probation or removed from probation) or if there is a change in enrollment as a consequence of a student being barred for failure to meet the terms of academic probation or for disciplinary reasons. In addition, grades will be sent home to parents of students who are dependents for tax purposes unless, due to unusual circumstances, a student makes a request to the dean of students that grades not be sent home. In order to be notified of a student’s grades and changes in status and enrollment, as described above, parents must complete and return to the Office of the Dean of Students in the College a certification of their student’s dependent status for tax purposes (FERPA form). If a student is not a dependent but wants parents to be sent grades, the student may make that request by completing the consent portion of the form. The FERPA form is sent to parents in the summer prior to the student’s matriculation. Students may notify the University of changes in their tax dependency status at any point by completing the appropriate form in the Office of the Dean of Students in the College. |
© 2000-2006 |