Academic Advising
Academic Advising at UCM is aimed at allowing students to define and achieve their individual academic goals. At UCM, each student is assigned an academic advisor immediately upon enrolment. This advisor will either be a staff member of UCM or one of the faculties of Maastricht University. Students and advisors are matched on the basis of the student’s academic interest and the advisor’s expertise.
The freedom to choose courses and thus design one’s own, individual academic profile is essential to a Liberal Arts and Sciences program. However, as the process of course selection and proper preparation for the transition to a Master’s program is complicated, students may take more advantage of that freedom if some assistance is available to them. This is where the academic advisor comes in.
The role of an academic advisor is to help the student make decisions regarding the content and planning of his or her individual curriculum. Primarily academic advisors provide their advisees with feedback and incentives to actively take responsibility for how they organize their studies, and to formulate concrete answers to questions such as:
What do I find interesting?
How do I combine my various interests into a meaningful curriculum?
How do I evaluate my own academic progress?
What kind of Master’s program would I like to pursue upon graduation?
What are my strengths, and where do I recognize the need and possibilities for improvement?
Each academic advisor will have a limited number of students as advisees. This ensures that every advisor really gets to know their advisees – their interests and plans, their strengths and challenges. While at UCM the decisions will always be yours, you will not have to be on your own when you make them.