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• 1 2022-05-10T07:13:46-04:00 Ryan O'Malley - Story of Us 8 PAF Program Details plain 2022-05-10T13:45:57-04:00 One of the organizations that has influenced my time at Harvard the most is the Peer Advising Fellows (PAF) Program, an organization dedicated to giving first years at the college a peer mentor to advise them on academic and social issues. When I first came to Harvard as an FGLI student from a school that historically did not send students to institutions of this caliber, I found myself heavily leaning on the support of my PAF just to stay afloat. While I have since adjusted to the fast paced, high achieving environment of the college, I still give huge amounts of credit to the advice and care that my PAF put into keeping me here as to why I have been so successful. 
  
  As I moved into my second year, I learned more about the PAF program in hopes of becoming the kind of mentor to other students that my PAF had been to me. I learned that PAFs are typically grouped in teams of 3 along with a Proctor (Harvard's version of an RA) in order to form an advising team for an entryway of students. 
  This team works together to plan events that help students take a break from the constant stress of classes, as well as advising them. Each PAF will be given a caseload of 7-10 pafees (or first year advisees) depending on the size of their entryway. PAFs are selected through an application and interview process to assess their leadership and advising skills. 
  
  In terms of leadership within the PAF program, there are both administrator and student leaders. Brooks Lambert-Sluder is the assistant director of the PAF program. He is the main point of contact for PAFs from the Advising Programs Office, and is often involved with any review of the effectiveness of a given PAF, as well as all decisions of how the program as a whole is run. There is also a team of student leaders called Eagle PAFs who work with Brooks to establish the priorities and actions of the program. The Eagles are selected after at least one year of PAF experience and are selected by another interview process. 
  
  I personally have been a (non-Eagle) PAF for the past two years. I currently have 10 pafees and work with an incredible advising team. While I have been a PAF, there have been several major changes, including Covid-19 and the removal and addition of academic advising responsibilities to the PAF role. During both of these events, I noticed that there didn't seem to be much opportunity for non-Eagle PAFs to voice concern about major shifts to their job. The system seemed to be more of a 'here's what happened and here's how you should proceed' rather than asking for the opinions of the PAFs before a decision was made. This really intrigued me as one of the aspects of a person applying to be a PAF that is weighted most heavily is their ability to give sound advice when faced with a challenge. To me, it seemed that the program was collecting leaders who cared about the experience of first years, but when the time came to actually solve a wide scale issue, they were completely left out. 
  
  With as expansive of a program as the PAF program is, I knew that there would be a wide variety of experiences with giving feedback, but given the chance that others were feeling the same way that I was, I wanted to explore the idea of if the program was doing enough to solicit feedback, and to make PAFs comfortable giving it. Every person is a huge resource of knowledge and ideas, and the opportunity to get more opinions and creative solutions to problems is both a goal of peer advising in the first place, and what I hoped to propose as a benefit of my project to the APO.