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The faculty were puzzled. As University Seminar instructors at the brand-new national university for women in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), they had just learned that they would also serve as students' advisers. Some of the multi-national faculty were unclear about what advising meant; those who thought they knew wondered how they could possibly advise when the curriculum of the first two years was set and there would be “nothing to advise about.” They wondered, too, whether these sheltered young women would ever comfortably meet with them.

As it turned out, they need not have worried. Beneath their black abayas and head scarves, most students were confident, assertive, and inquisitive, often more so than the students at home. They did not hesitate to seek information or assistance – or to let us know exactly how they felt about courses, instructors, or campus rules. In helping students make sense of the university and understand that they shared responsibility for their education, advising proved to be just as vital in the U.A.E. as it is in the U.S., possibly more so. Our experience reinforced the notion that while advising across cultures differs from advising at home, much also remains the same.

The first-year curriculum offered no choices: all students took English, Arabic and Islamic Studies, University Seminar, and ITMS, a course integrating information technology, math, and science. If not courses and curriculum, then what academic issues needed to be addressed? Coming from an educational system in which rote learning was the norm, students had to shift from memorization to active learning and to think differently about what it means to be a student. Because the seminar program and academic advising were coupled, faculty could provide plenty of practice in active learning and address broad issues in class, issues like the purposes of general education or the rationale for the foundation courses they were taking. Our students needed help in understanding the requirements but even more in understanding the mission of the institution – why it required what it did of students, what its goals were for them.

An advising session often centers on the adviser's providing information and helping students clarify their options so that they can make good choices. Advisers gently prod students into making the most of available educational resources, encourage them to stretch themselves and develop intellectually and personally. But choices depend on context, and it is that context that we too often overlook, both at home and abroad. Students' immediate educational choices, for example, are limited by the offerings available to them, their personal circumstances and constraints, and such individual factors as talent and background, confidence and motivation, stage of development, and values. In some cultures, women's choices continue to be constrained as well by family and societal attitudes toward their future work, about what is appropriate for women to do.

Given the increasing diversity on Western campuses with students from many different cultural backgrounds and value systems, it should have been easier than it was to avoid imposing our values on our students in the guise of advice. But many aspects of culture are so deeply and subtly ingrained that one does not always recognize their source – that's not a value, we might think, that's just the way things are or ought to be. Advisers are not psychoanalysts, trained to listen and ask just the occasional question, never to hazard an opinion. But as guests in another country, invited to teach that country's citizens, we needed to do just that to make our advising as value-free as possible. It often proved difficult.

When, for example, students reported that they could not study at home because they were required by their mothers to sit with the women of the household in the evening, we could not say, “Nonsense. Why don't you just go to your room?” Our role was not to insist on privacy for study or to suggest how the student might educate her mother but rather to help her think about time – about what was available and what she had at her disposal and where she would find time for study – even while recognizing that the concept of “using” or “planning” time is itself a cultural value. Advising sessions alerted us, as they often do, to this matter and others that the institution needed to address.

Our students were primarily first-generation college goers in a country whose citizens have experienced an extraordinary transformation from lives of dire poverty to extreme affluence within two or three brief generations. Until the 1960s, schooling at any level was the exception, particularly for women. Many of our students' mothers, some of whom remain illiterate, have little experience with or understanding of the demands of academic study in higher education. Our conversations with students helped us realize that as a university we needed to do more to involve the families of our students to help them understand institutional expectations and demands.

One tends to see similarity more often than difference when working cross-culturally, but differences will insist on being recognized, some in rather amusing ways. Our students arrived for advising appointments trailed by two, three, or more friends, all crowding together in the tiny advising cubicles deemed barely adequate for a conversation between two people. The Western faculty prized individualism; students needed the comforting familiarity of their group. Wading right into whatever issue was being discussed, friends participated as much as those being advised, arguing, cajoling, agreeing. Intense friendships between and among our students were the norm, and privacy among friends is not a value; so it was natural for these students to have friends join them for advising. A poor grade or inability to understand something in class was as ready a topic for group discussion as more neutral matters. We soon learned that, when appropriately tapped, the friendship group was a powerful force to help students succeed, and tap it we did in our work with students on probation.

Even though some were already married and had several children, most of our students came to the university from highly sheltered and sex-segregated lives. Many knew little of the world. Secondary schools offered a structured curriculum with rote learning the norm, and our students had little previous opportunity to explore their interests or to learn through experience. Although they were eager to have careers, recognizing that their country was overly dependent on foreign workers and needed their talents, they had almost no experiences or knowledge on which to base a choice.

Not unlike students at home, some were overly complacent about latching onto the “career of the day,” frustrating advisers by their seeming willingness to select a major or career field purely on the basis of a course they liked, what a friend had chosen, or what a parent recommended. The students in the U.A.E., however, brought less experience to the process and were sometimes further limited by what their families deemed appropriate for a woman to do. Some students, for instance, could not consider jobs which necessitated interaction with men. Like women everywhere, many struggled about how they would reconcile motherhood and a career.

Finding collective ways to educate our students about careers and jobs became one of the more urgent tasks for advisers. So that students would make good choices when they selected a major at the end of their second year, seminar faculty worked with Career Services during the spring semester of the first year to mount a month-long career and major fair, providing students with highly specific information about the various jobs to which each prospective major could lead. We hosted speakers from various fields, either employers or, when we could find them, women who could serve as role models. Although this was an English-medium institution, we produced all written materials in Arabic as well as English so that students could share the information with their families. As they gained information, many students changed their minds about their prospective major, as beginning college students often do.

Drawing the line between personal counseling and academic advising, always difficult, is even more so when disparities in culture and values exist between students and their advisers. “What can I do?” a student asks. “My husband thinks I'm neglecting the baby by being in college. He's demanding that I drop out.” Problems like this and others considerably more difficult do not yield to easy solutions. Allowing the students to talk things through and asking a few gentle questions rather than trying to find solutions often provides the best “advice,” and in a cross-cultural setting, is perhaps all the adviser should offer.

Advising affords a powerful and critical link between the student and the university. Advising served as that link in the United Arab Emirates by helping students understand the mission and academic standards of the new university, their choices of majors and careers, and our expectations for their being active participants in every aspect of their learning. By trusting us, our advisees offered the privilege of knowing them in all their complexity and coming to understand and respect the differences in values and culture that informed the choices they made.

Diane W. Strommer is dean, University College and Special Academic Programs, The University of Rhode Island. She can be reached at diane_strommer@hotmail.com