Two advisers over your time here
You start with a professional adviser in the advising center who knows requirements, policy, and the whole catalog cold, and who carries you through the undeclared and early-major years. Once you are established in a major you also work with a faculty adviser in the department who knows the field, the sequences, research, and the job market. Keep meeting both when your questions span planning and profession.
Early alert, weeks 3 and 6
In the third and sixth weeks of each term, instructors in most lower-division courses submit a quick progress flag — attendance, missing work, low early scores, or "doing well." Flags route to your adviser and the Student Success Center, who reach out. It is an offer of help triggered by a pattern, not a disciplinary step, and it exists because week 6 is early enough to change the grade and week 12 is not.
What to do when you get an outreach
Answer it. A five-minute reply or a fifteen-minute meeting is the whole ask, and the students who engage with an early-alert contact recover the term far more often than the ones who ignore it. If the flag is wrong — the instructor missed a submission — say so; that gets fixed too.
The planning tools
The degree audit shows requirements; the planner builds and stores multi-term schedules; the what-if tool tests a different major or minor against your record. Advisers use the same screens you do. Run the audit before every advising meeting so the conversation is about decisions, not data entry.
Advising holds
Some programs place a hold each term that clears only after you meet your adviser — it is there to make sure someone looks at your plan before you register. Book the meeting as soon as the scheduling window opens; the week before registration is fully booked everywhere.
If the fit is wrong
Advising is a working relationship and a poor one is worth fixing. You can request a different adviser in most programs. A neutral option for a stuck situation is the Student Ombuds.
Beyond course planning
Advisers are also a routing service: "I'm failing a class," "I might need a semester off," "I don't think this major is right," "I can't afford next term." They know which office handles each and can walk you there. Raising it early is the difference between options and damage control.
Fictional information
UW–Porter Falls is a work of parody. Every office, person, building, phone number and statistic on this page is invented; nothing here describes a real institution or a service you can actually contact.