City College is adding nine new counselors to areas all around campus thanks to the Institutional Student Learning Outcomes project, leaving the Channels Ed board excited for the possibility of a better counseling experience.

The editors are uniformly thrilled about the addition of more counselors but still wonder what will be done about the kinks in the counseling system.

Specialty areas of counselors in programs like Express to Success and the Transfer Achievement Program have appropriated enough advisors to make sure most areas of student success are taken care of.

Four of the nine counselors will be placed in academic counseling where same-day appointments are made. These appointments fill very quickly as students need to arrive early in the morning in order to find out what classes are needed for their major, how to transfer and what the next step is.

Most editors feel that the experience attempting to get an appointment for academic counseling mirrors that of the Department of Motor Vehicles. That doesn’t mean however that the Ed board has not had good experiences with counseling, especially those of us that are International or Honors students.

Here’s a list of experiences that the editors recollect on and hope can change with the addition of new counselors.

• The impossibility of scheduling an appointment any other time than the opening hour
• Scheduling your own availability and sometimes time-consuming transit for the chance of getting an appointment
• Arriving on time to the scheduled appointment and having to wait anywhere from a half-hour to an hour
• Being told that if you’re a freshman you will not be allowed a closed office appointment but rather a counter appointment in front of peers
• Being guided to take a course that doesn’t exist at City College
• Having different experiences with different counselors, leading one to not understand which direction is better to take

It’s well known that City College is unlike any other and the influx of students is at an all time high. For the editors, it is seen as an attempt to keep up with student services in order to cultivate a more confident student body that is more eager to earn a degree or transfer.

On City College’s website, under the category ‘counseling services,’ a self-help power point on academic advising is available. The session lasts two and a half hours but even editors that have used this say it does not compare to the face-to-face experience.

City College has an award-winning transfer academy program and is dedicated to sending students to their ideal colleges by following course outlines such as The Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum, known as IGETC and the CSU agreement worksheet.

Without one-on-one attention and specialized counseling sessions many students are left trying to go at it alone.

Hopefully with the new counselors giving the student body advising sessions will mirror that of the exceptional help that some of our editors have experienced with the International or Honors counselors.