Wearing a funky purple and fuchsia velvet hat, Mary Mander patiently guides communications students along their career paths from her office in Carnegie Building. Although most academic advisers prefer to flip through thick, standard-issue career planning guides to prepare students, Mander has another device to field out the future: Tarot cards.

During lunch breaks and rare slots of free time, Mander practices an occult avocation that dates back to medieval times, advising her friends in matters of money, love and the future.

Tarot card reading as a pastime is a far cry from Mander's past in the convent. But the switch from Catholicism to the occult isn't too much of a stretch for a woman who, as a nun, swung her butt a la Whoopi in Sister Act while directing the convent's choir.

Mander is a small woman with sparkling brown eyes peering out of glasses slipping off her nose. She is careful to explain to me what the cards mean, asking the clueless (me) if what she is picking up from the cards seems right, stressing that the reading is more advice than a prediction.

"I, myself, interpret all the cards, in whatever condition they are, as a two-edged sword," Mander says. "That gives me a wider range of interpretation. I journey inward into my own interior being and let my inner voice guide me."

The "journey inward" takes about 45 minutes. I clear my mind and think of a fairly simple question (the outcome of a romantic relationship), but I'm not supposed to tell Mander. Then I meditate on the cards, shuffle them, meditate again and cut the deck three times.

The fortuneteller has been shuffling, meditating on and deriving meanings from the ornate cards for 20 years, when a friend taught her using the famous Tarot card reader Aleister Crowley's deck. Mander says she was first attracted to the detailed illustrations on the 78 cards because they were so interesting looking and imaginatively drawn.

"This deck, for some reason, is the one I get the vibes from," Mander says. "This deck is right for me. There's communication with it."

The cards are larger than regular-size playing cards (about 4 inches by 6 inches), so they are a bit clumsy to shuffle. But the cards need to be that large because the illustrations depict different meanings -- the star signifies dreams-come-true, the empress with a moon and pelican signifies great fertility. Each card is also numbered, and each number has its own meaning. For example, seven stands for wisdom.

Mander arranges the cards in a pattern, called a spread. There are different spreads you can use, and Mander uses what is known as the Celtic cross, which is the most common one.

"This card covers you, this card crosses you, this card represents your negative feelings, this card represents the feelings of others toward you, this represents your positive feelings, this card represents matters of the heart," Manders says as she deftly arranges the cards on the cluttered desk in front of her.

The professor asks me if my question was about a boyfriend and proceeds to ask me questions about us. Some seem completely on the mark, but a few don't have much to do with the situation at all.

"Tarot readers don't tell you the future," Mander says. "A Tarot reader can only tell you what the traditional meaning of the cards is and the client has to decide what the meaning is in his or her case."

But though Mander says she cannot tell the future, she has found that her readings hold true.

"Three years after I'd started reading, I realized my readings were really accurate and really right on the mark," she says. "That's when I realized I had a gift for it."

The former nun believes the reading is a gift for people, a way for them to explore themselves, as well as a confirmation.

Two months ago, she read cards for R. Thomas Berner and Paulette Berner, Mander's colleagues in the School of Communications. The couple found the reading to be positive -- R. Thomas Berner said Mander reads the Tarot cards as a cultural historian.

"She's looking at all aspects of how people communicate," R. Thomas Berner said. "She was trying to bring to a 20th century pizza party what people believed centuries ago."

Terrie Zurzola, a computer-systems specialist who reads Tarot cards in her free time, describes the reading experience as both a vision and a vibration.

"Some of the everyday things that happen just freak you out," Zurzola said. "Sometimes you see the tragic and sometimes you see the good."

The 32-year-old native Philadelphian began reading Tarot cards 12 years ago when someone told her she needed a medium for her gift, a gift which she believes everyone has.

"I believe the psychic is in everyone," Zurzola says. "I think I'm pretty talented, but I wouldn't call myself the primo-psychic.

"It's as if you had a little window you could look through and see the other side of the problem," she adds. "They're asking you what is on the other side. You have to be able to see something to give people advice."

As Mander collects the cards that served as the window into my destiny, she assures me that my experience is confidential, like the relationship between the client and a psychologist.

"I think a medium is more like a psychologist than anything else because the client probes his or her interior landscape," she said.

Well, my window has been peered into, my interior landscape has been probed, and I've taken a journey inward. Now I just have to let my inner voice guide me through the difficult decision looming in my near future -- possibly a tall, dark stranger.