No! That's totally normal!

Yeah, that sounds fine. Just don't write love letters on any of your assignments.

Depends on the classes and the size of your school. Toward the end of my illustrious career as a student, I'd spend all damn day with the same guy in different classes.

Of course it is stalking if you have no reason to be taking the prof's classes.

The issue is actually that I like her a lot, and she's one of the few teachers in the department who does not make me want to tear my hair out during class -- she conducts really structured classes and answers questions really well, and I respect her as a practitioner as well as a teacher. I learned a lot in the one class I've already taken with her.

But the courses are tiny -- 9 students in one, 20 in the other -- and generally very interactive, so it just feels like it could be...weird.

On preview: Heh, no, I *have* to take these particular classes (it's grad school, we're on a very structured course progression), but I could take them with other professors. I just kinda don't want to.

My professors have been very receptive to this. It gives them a chance to examine my abilities and inclinations, and to give me more personalized guidance. It has also led to some very congenial mentoring, obviously tremendously valuable (and gratifying).

But my university is small, and my department more so. However, I've noticed (here and at the larger uni where I started) that profs who get to know me in one class often urge me to sign up for others they offer in the coming semesters. I think they're as pleased to work with engaged and bright students as we are to work with gifted profs.

Not weird at all. If I found a professor I liked I'd do my best to take their classes in the future.

Did I mention she is also my advisor?

Having said that: one of my very favorite professor pointed out to me the value of distributing my classes throughout the department whenever possible. When you know more profs (and they know you), you get exposed to a wider range of teaching and reasoning styles, as well as a wider range of contacts in your field.

Not that her being my advisor changes much, I know.

This is the same feeling I get when I suddenly decide I need a new hairdresser, because the current hairdresser is "obviously" bored with me. Not that he's given any indication of such, just that I start getting all squirmy.

On preview: Elsa, yeah, I've been trying to do so, but it's a fairly small department, and having been in class with some of the professors who are also teaching the summer and fall classes, I just do NOT want to deal with them again.

I'm also hyper-afraid of imposing, and I don't think it's strange. She sounds like a great professor. Why not create an experience that you'll enjoy if you're able?

What Elsa said. It's not the imposition that's a problem here. Among other things, it coudl be too much of a good thing -- at the end of the term you won't be able to stand another minute in one or her classes. Also, I'd be wary of choosing a professor based on "liking" their style. It can be good to be challenged.

You also can't play profs off against each other with paper due dates.

Did I mention she is also my advisor?

I think this is a good thing, still. It does seem like a great opportunity for mentorship.

I wonder if you could just discuss it with her - maybe humorously, as you have here? "I don't want to seem like I'm mindlessly following you around, but I work well within your teaching style and course structure. Do you think it's all right for me to continue with you, or would you recommend that I try to study with a range of other instructors?" She should be able to give you some good guidance there, as your advisor.

You may want to discount my opinion because it comes from the history/humanities fields, where working closely with a single professor is not uncommon. If you're a modernist, for instance, you're going to end up taking a lot of classes from the department's specialist in modernism; there are rarely people on a history department team with the same specialties.

Do you get along with her well enough to ask her?

I think I'd bring it up as- I really enjoy your teaching so I've ended up taking most of my classes from you. Should I not be doing that? So if she says "no, it's fine!" it probably really is. If it's been bothering her, now's her opportunity to suggest Mr. So-and-so's really excellent take on Whatever.

I took a huge number of very small classes (3 people, 6 people, etc) from one person, but then there weren't any others teaching those subjects.

(in other words, what Miko said better)

Part of it's not just that her teaching style is good, but that a lot of the other professors in the department are really bad teachers. I feel like I learn a lot from the reading, but the courses are just three hours of unorganized, often uninformed (because other students often don't do the reading) discussion. If I wasn't required to be there, I'd be skipping classes. The professors aren't presenting material as much as just asking our opinions on it, and, while I hate to sound totally arrogant, for the most part, my fellow students do not have very interesting takes on things. So it will just be a bunch of really basic questions that could have been answered if they had actually done the reading, or else really bizarre overly specific questions along the lines of "Oh, I have a grandmother who totally has this mental illness! Let me talk for 15 minutes about her! Except that over the course of this talk, I will reveal that I am completely guessing about it, and am probably wrong!" And all the professors are also therapists, so they are usually too nice to cut people off.

Whereas in her course, I actually felt like the class discussion was useful, and that I learned more from her than I did from the texts. She also had a remarkable way to take what students were saying and tie it into larger points -- that is, class discussion contributed to the topic at hand, rather than derailing it.

Plus, from what she's said about how she deals with clients, I just really like her professional style. She combines a lot of eclectic theories and philosophies in ways that I like, and that are similar to how I approach the world and instinctively would like to approach clients.

But I can also see the benefit to having someone challenge that a bit, too.

Sigh. I don't know. I feel like I should probably go ask her about it, but ... then we're back to feeling weird. :)

God, I HATE classes like that! I had one class that was supposedly on fundamentalism in post-Soviet central asia and it ALWAYS turned into a huge argument on Turkish politics (too many Turks in the class). And those classes where you're the only whose read anything, so the teacher knows she had better only call on you? Ugh! What a complete waste of time! Well, at least, with the exception of the class full of Turks (the teacher of which was going through a divorce and was absolutely mentally absent), none of my teachers have been so nice as to let people blather on.

God, I hated school.

/rant

It would be really weird if the same student showed up in all of my classes, but that's because this semester, I only teach one course. :p

I don't think you need to ask her about it and I don't think you need to worry too much about it. I think that as your advisor, she's likely to speak up if she's worried that you're limiting your education in the department. On the other hand, as she is your advisor, you can can certainly approach her, in the manner that Miko suggests, and not feel weird about it.

I, personally, would counsel against it, even if you felt frustrated in other classes in the department. Part of education, especially in professional education, is learning how to deal with imperfectly presented information and still get to the goal.

s_r, heh. Yeah, I'm in the midst of Psychopathology, which means we've given a ton of people who have generally good skills at ferreting out emotional states the DSM-IV, and taught them how to diagnose people. And the lovely thing about the DSM is that it's pretty positive that pretty much any emotional state is a diagnosable disorder if it's strong enough, so now basically everyone is convinced that everyone in their lives is suffering from grave mental problems.

Which we probably all are, but I really wish the professor would start saying, "It has to be clinically significant" or "It has to actually impair their lives" a bit more. And a bit more often.

When I was a fifteen-year-old library page, I remember paging through the DSM and deciding that I suffered from every single illness.

Seconding everyone else -- taking multiple classes taught by the same prof is not only acceptable, it's flattering if you participate, and do well in the classes. Whether it's related to your major/concentration/whatever doesn't matter either: as long as you're genuinely interested in what they're teaching, why not?

I did this exact thing in college, with good results.

haha! Another reason I could never go into medicine or mental health- it would bring all my latent hypochondria to the surface in about 30 seconds.

Your professor will probably be excited to interact with you more, but she will probably also advise you to expand your horizons. I agree with crush-onastick... there will always be bad instructors. And a lot of times they will be teaching classes you need to or should take. In those cases you might need to take a class from them.

Also consider that since she's your advisor, you might be spending a lot of time outside of class with her and that is kind of like taking a class with her.

I like to try and go to office hours at least once with all my professors. Sometimes they will end up explaining very well things that weren't clear in class. They might also start discussions that become very insightful. Class isn't your only opportunity to learn!

"Advisor" is a bit loose, as a term. I've met with her once over the course of two semesters so far.

My program requires that all the students take the same courses, in the same order. So the only variable, student to student, is the teacher.

And I think part of me is looking to stick with her because it's a pretty hands-on, professional-training program -- a lot of the courses are "Here are the techniques you can use to counsel children," "Here are the techniques you can use to you counsel families," "Here are the techniques you can use to counsel end-of-life clients." So it's not just "Think about this stuff this way," but also "This is the skill set you need."

Does that make any sense? It's not just "I feel like professors are presenting the material badly," it's more like, "I don't feel like these professors are helping me develop the skill set I need to be a competent counselor." The professors I dislike are also pretty un-challenging; one of them I'm writing off because I did not a single lick of work in his course, and I got an A. Given it was the only practical, hands-on, "here's where you learn and practice your techniques" course I took that semester, I'm not happy that it was so easy. (And it's not like I blew off assignments -- I did them all to the best of my ability. There just weren't really any in-depth assignments.)

So it's not just that other professors aren't clear (the subject matter is not that hard, I'm doing well and I "get it"), it's just that they don't seem to be expecting very much of us, so I'm getting bored in their classes.

And then there are a few teachers I'm really excited about -- this professor I'm talking about being one -- and I guess I'm just trying to gauge if that's normal grad school behavior to follow them around over the course of a couple years.

On a side note: You know, I never really grasped, at all, how hard it must be for high-school students of non-college-educated parents to understand the ins and outs of the system; I knew it was an issue that kept a lot of poor kids back, but it seemed reasonably surmountable.

And now for the first time in my life I'm getting to an education level above my parents', and I feel like I suddenly lost a great deal of confidence in making decisions like this; I have no idea what's "normal" for the situation. It's disorienting to me as a confident-slash-bitchy 30-year-old, so I can't imagine how hard it must be as an 18-year-old.

Grad school is all about the relationships. You're doing fine. But as far as the branching out, you might tell the prof what it is you respect about her teaching style and tell her that you wondered if she could recommend other instructors that could also meet your demanding standards but give you other perspectives as well.

My reaction was like yours, occhiblu -- at the level you're studying, I'd want good models of professional understanding and communication. The type of growth you get by trying to glean learnings from a bad teacher isn't the type of growth I'd be after from a professional graduate program.

And on the side note - I am the first college graduate in my family, and it was incredibly difficult to figure out anything about the world of college, from the very idea that I should have been putting together a college 'resume' during my high school years, to visiting schools, interviewing, applying, to the kind of study habits I'd need, to the social aspects and personal changes I could expect, to normal dorm furnishings, to the behaviors used to communicate and gain support from professors, on and on. It was like traveling to a foreign country. Graduate school, as you say, is even more an undiscovered country.

I went to a pretty small college, and it was perfectly natural for students to "stalk" their favorite professors in a particular field of study. My minor was in STS, so I took 3 consecutive classes from a professor who had practically fathered the field.

This is a minor threadjack, but there is actually a document out there on how to be a good grad student in general.

Threadjacks good! (That document looks great, Nucleo; thanks.)

And thanks, as always, to everyone helping talk me through this shit. I have another week and a half until registration to dither, but now I feel like I can dither in a fully informed manner.

When I was at Iowa, I took two semesters from a man I called the poetry daddy-- the second time it was both because I did not want to take a class from a particular instructor who had made it clear she did not like my work, and did not want to share a different class with someone I couldn't stand who had been stalking a fellow classmate (I had spent both seminars of the first year and waded through the Iowa Review's poetry slush pile during the second semester with him). I still regret not having applied for fiction .

Late to the party, but in grad school, I would be surprised if I didn't constantly run into the same prof.