NYU's General Studies Program Leads to Transfer Woes

By Cathryn Horwitz

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Twenty-two year old Lael Laderman said she plans on applying to veterinary school. Having excelled at New York University for four years, leaving the General Studies Program for the College of Arts and Science with great enthusiasm for her major, Laderman hoped to be in vet school now.

But somewhere between GSP and CAS, someone missed a beat.

Laderman is taking her final required class as a fifth year senior.

NYU’s General Studies Program—a two year liberal arts core curriculum—gives its students an associate’s degree, after which they transfer to the school housing their intended major. However, some students have been encountering obstacles, from changing major requirements to poor communication with advising—whether GSP’s or their chosen school’s. Students have been left hanging, unsure where to go next, as the semesters tick by. But these students’ complaints may be part of larger problems in organization and communication in GSP, and perhaps NYU.

Though GSP certainly has many important and useful resources for its students—a thorough curriculum, personalized advising and a favorably small instructor to student ratio—which the students appreciate, at times they are not enough to balance out the negative experiences.

Jennifer E. Gottlieb, 20, a Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies major in the CAS, made the transfer out of GSP when most do: spring of her sophomore year. The process, however, was difficult for her as she was studying abroad in London that same semester.

Gottlieb explained that a GSP student is supposed to talk to their intended major’s department head at NYU’s campus in Manhattan.

“I had to do it all by email and it was really hectic,” she said.

In the end, she successfully transferred, but trouble with the advising department brewed ahead.

CAS requires one math course for the Morse Academic Plan (MAP)—the core program of the College of Arts and Science. Gottlieb said she was concerned about fulfilling this Quantitative Reasoning requirement (QR) with NYU, because she struggled with math. As an alternative, she hoped to take a summer math course during at the University of Massachusetts and transfer the credits.

Gottlieb contacted both GSP and CAS advising, as she was still in GSP, but it was CAS’s math requirement. But Gottlieb only became more stressed, confused and frustrated.

She said GSP advisers told her they could not advise her on CAS requirements, only on internal issues with GSP.

Gottlieb did not yet have an official CAS adviser to inquire about the specifics of the QR requirement, so she attended walk-in advising hours and met with a CAS adviser, Jennifer Bell, from whom she said she didn’t get any information.

“She pretty much flat out told me she couldn’t help me,” Gottlieb said. Bell explained that there were too many variables involved in determining whether the math credits would transfer to CAS: which school, what professor, what the syllabus was like, and what her final grade was.

Caught in limbo for the summer, Gottlieb said she worked very hard to achieve an A in the class at UMass. Though the credits did transfer in the end, Gottlieb found the situation incredibly stressful and frustrating.

But meeting a school’s core requirements, such as the QR requirement, is not a problem that GSP students alone experience, said Fred S. Schwarzbach, 58, an associate dean at GSP.

He explained that if, for example, an intended English major took an easier QR course to fulfill the requirement with minimal stress, and then decided to switch majors to psychology, it is possible the QR course that student took will not fulfill the major’s QR requirement.

“So I’m sure in that case the student may feel that the quality of advising was poor,” Schwarzbach said, “but it’s not really an advising issue so much as there are lots of complex requirements, and a lot of them will change depending on the student’s course of study.”

Certain requirements are consistent within NYU’s schools. For example, CAS’s language requirement calls for four semesters of the same language to fulfill the core requirement.

Laderman’s adviser for her Medieval and Renaissance Studies major told her that she needed three semesters of a modern language and two semesters of an ancient language in order to graduate with her major degree. Laderman took three semesters of Hebrew as her modern language, and two semesters of Latin as her ancient language.

Senior year crept up on Laderman, and her adviser did not address the issue that CAS would require her to finish another semester of Hebrew in order to graduate.

When her adviser made her aware of the issue, Laderman was already past the point where she could register for Hebrew in her final semester of senior year. She did not graduate with the rest of her senior class.

After fighting the decision for a semester, insisting she had completed all other requirements, and had taken not four, but five semesters of languages, even if they were two different languages, she gave in. She is now taking Intermediate Hebrew II in her fifth year at NYU and is struggling to recall information from its prerequisite courses, now almost two years displaced.

Laderman said she felt that GSP prepared her very well for CAS from an academic standpoint—for classes, intensive writing and studying techniques.

“But to prepare me to go into CAS for what I needed to do to graduate, they didn’t tell me,” Laderman said. She said she there were no informational meetings for incoming CAS students advertised.

Laderman also cited that she did not have an assigned GSP adviser. “They just kind of sent me to whoever was free,” she said.

But with dozens of majors in CAS, where most GSP students transfer, GSP staff must deal with unique advising issues.

Schwarzbach explained that when he began his tenure at NYU three years ago, one of the largest departments within CAS, which he declined to name, had radically restructured its program and requirements. GSP students account for about 15 or 20 percent of the majors in that particular department, and because of the changes, GSP advisers had been telling their students incorrect information.

“Looking back it’s easy to say, well that department should have given us advance warning and easily could have done so,” he said. “But it requires people working hard to think about every step of the process and to recognize that things change and it changes for our students, too.”

Schwarzbach said GSP faculty is working on ways to improve communication flow between its advising and that of the other schools, primarily CAS, to avoid problems such as these.

“One of the things we’ve also done is that we’ve advanced the timing of our students’ sophomore admission,” Schwarzbach explained.

GSP students used to transfer by April 1, only a couple weeks before CAS advising or fall begins, but this year, students transferred by the end of February, giving them more time to seek departmental advising before mid-April registration.

Svetlana Keselman, 20, a CAS junior majoring in English and Italian-Linguistics, found the GSP program very personal and rewarding.

“If GSP was a four year thing I would just stay in GSP,” Keselman said.

Keselman spoke highly of her GSP adviser, Martin Reichert, and said she had classes with him twice. She explained with the small classes, the professors knew everyone’s name, and could get to know their students better.

Schwarzbach also emphasized the favorably small instructor to student ratio.

“It’s…important that GSP has its own faculty and we’re a teaching faculty,” Schwarzbach said. “Students don’t encounter graduate assistants in our classes. They’re taught by full time faculty, in small groups.”

However experiencing up to two years in a school where professors give individual attention carries its own detriments. Ilona A. Margiotta, 20, a Gender and Sexuality Studies major, said she almost chose Psychology as her major, but GSP’s small classes did not prepare her for the major’s 200 person or more lectures.

Margiotta selected her major based on a GSP elective she took first semester of her sophomore year, after which she transferred into CAS a semester early, because of extra high school credits.

While she valued the GSP experience, and is happy that she discovered her passion for her major within the program, Margiotta said she did not see a difference between CAS and GSP beyond the name.

“I know they [GSP] like to coddle you but I don’t think I would have sunk down into the floor of the ocean if I had gotten into [CAS instead of GSP],” Margiotta said.

Schwarzbach sees distinct differences between CAS and GSP.

“We’re both liberal arts programs,” he said, “but the MAP is really nothing like a core curriculum. There are really only two classes in the MAP that every student will take: expository writing and Conversations with the West. Other than that every student is choosing from fairly large lists of different courses.

“Our curriculum is one coherent program of study, and every single student in the program will do it,” he said, “and I feel that’s a pretty important difference.”

GSP will continue to make improvements, and Schwarzbach said the school is already better than it was even two years ago about communicating with the CAS advising staff and directors of undergraduate studies and many large departments at CAS.

In the meantime, GSP’s academics are putting students on track to be in stellar standing with their new schools. Schwarzbach says GSP’s writing intensive curriculum prepares the students for their major classes.

Gottlieb felt GSP prepared her in many ways. Like Margiotta, an elective course offered at GSP inspired her major—“Near Eastern Cultures”—and she received credit towards her major from the class. She felt GSP laid the foundations for her to continue studying in CAS.

“I think that it just, like most organizations, has a few [traps] that I fell through,” Gottlieb said, “and that I know other people have fallen through.”