At Monash University, I have actually had very little interaction with the support staff as I have yet to encounter any difficulties. During registration, I spoke with a woman in the Engineering Faculty briefly about whether to take three or four units. She recommended starting with four, since I would always have the option of dropping the fourth. Then within the first few weeks of the beginning of classes, I decided to drop my course load from four courses to three. I emailed the study abroad liaison for Northeastern asking where I should go to do this and she responded in a timely manner. Her advice was helpful yet not specific, so I still had to follow up with a classmate to figure out exactly where to go. The lack of specificity just stemmed from the fact that she isn’t an engineering specific advisor. The staff in the engineering faculty were also helpful in assisting me with dropping a class and when I needed to get my calculator approved. Aside from that, I have had very little need for interacting with the support staff.
Because the lectures here are structured differently, some of my classes actually rotate lecturers. As an aside, they are not all actually professors since they do not all hold a PhD, so everyone just calls them lecturers. My favourite lecturer is actually the department head for the Chemical Engineering program at Monash, Karen Hapgood. She teaches Process Control, a class that is usually dry, tedious, and math heavy. Karen is very evidently passionate and knowledgeable about the material and presents the material in a very clear and organized manner. Unlike some of my other lecturers, she does not read material off the slides and is easy to understand. In addition, her tutorials are well structured and the learning objectives are very clear when working through the problem sets. Unfortunately, another lecturer has temporarily taken over the lectures to teach about a different area of process control.
