<p>Well, all you HAVE to do is go to class with your group, but I know a lot of people become really good friends with fellow advisees and hang out all the time, go to parties together, go out to dinner as a group. Your advisor is supposed to be the one who makes sure that you’re fulfilling all the requirements. You can’t register until the advisor approves the courses that you’re taking. Basically it’s to make sure you don’t do stupid **** like forget about the World Civ requirement or sign up for only 3 credits. They want to make sure you’re on track.</p>
<p>But since I was in Perspectives, yeah, my advisor was a French professor who had no idea about Poli Sci/IR/Econ requirements, and knew even less about transferring credit from the courses I planned on taking at Columbia this summer. She kept referring me to various professors WITHIN the language department that were transfer of credit representatives. It was only when I was complaining to my mom that it wasn’t my fault that I wasn’t get my transfer of credit requests approved so loudly on the phone that my friend Sara came outside and was like, what are you talking about? It’s the easiest thing ever and you can do it online, it took me five minutes. However, I really really really liked my Public Opinion and Foreign Policy professor (Eichenberg…I advise anyone interested to take that class, b/c he does his research in this field and is really an expert…all the other experts are always quoting him in the reading, and on the backs of various books it’s always like, HIM quoted as praising it) and he was glad to be my major advisor, so now I have an advisor within the Poli Sci department that can help me out with those requirements.</p>
<p>However, if I had taken Econ and IR freshman year like most freshman IR majors do, I probably would have never gotten to know the professor so well. So I think I personally would have preferred to have host advising with someone from my own major. But if you’re really interested in the class itself that’s offered by Perspectives or Explorations, go for it!</p>