<p>@brie – This should really be something your daughter should be responsible for. This is all part of her taking charge of her own education. If she needs help, I"m sure she’ll ask. </p>
<p>And anyway, I wouldn’t worry about it. Unless things have changed since I was a first-year, first years are assigned an advisor based on their list of potential academic interests. Once you declare a major, you get to pick an advisor in your major department, and most people pick a professor that they’ve had classes with and like, someone they know pretty well, and/or someone who has advised someone they know. </p>
<p>For the very first advisor, if she gets a real dud, she can always do what I did and declare her major early. I put down as one of my interests something that I by no means something I was all that interested in and I got, yes, a prof from that discipline as my first advisor. She was great, but I quickly developed a strong interest in Government and that was just not her specialty, she couldn’t advise me what to take. So she suggested that I declare early because it’s just a matter of filling out some paperwork and you can change your major as often as you want, so if I decided later I wanted to major in something else, that would be no problem. I picked Government and asked the one government professor who had taught me to be my advisor. He ended up staying my advisor all four years and I never switched majors. </p>
<p>He was one of the “sign whatever you put in front of me” types though, and I often wished I had a prof who was a little more involved. He never obstructed me, which was good, because I always had a very definite plan for what I wanted to do. But he also never really took a deep interest either. We were cordial and he did whatever I asked of him (wrote recommendations, whatever), but we were not close and I felt like, had I not been so self directed, I might have been a little lost. </p>
<p>Some students really need advisors to push them outside of their comfort zone, or to keep them from overdoing it. Students like to think they always know best, but an advisor’s job is to help them see the big picture, and encourage them to think about things they might otherwise not want to. Remember that most students do not discuss their course schedule with their parents in advance, they’re just doing what they think is best and what appeals to them, so the advisors try to temper that a little.</p>