When a gap year helps
Health-professions and graduate applicants increasingly take one or two years to gain experience and raise a test score or GPA; admissions committees view a well-used gap year positively. It's also reasonable simply to work and save before more school.
Making it count
Line up the next thing before you graduate — a paid research tech position, a post-baccalaureate program, an AmeriCorps or similar service year, a fellowship, or a job in the field. Career Services keeps listings for each and can help you weigh offers and keep an application timeline on track.
In and around Porter Falls
Career Services works with every major, but the pattern is the same across them: a required internship, co-op or clinical placement before graduation, listed on each program page. Ninety-six percent of Porter undergraduates complete one, most of them with an employer in the Valley or the Cities.
The practical details
Good reasons: Strengthening a professional-school application, saving money, gaining clinical or field hours, testing a career, recovering from burnout. Structure it: A job, a fellowship, a research position, or a service year — not an open-ended plan to "figure it out". Stay connected: Keep in touch with recommenders and advisors; you'll need them when you apply. Anything time-sensitive — an accommodation, a booking, a deadline — is worth confirming directly before you rely on it, because the specifics here can change from term to term.
If you have a question
The office behind this is Career Services (Founders Union, Room 160). Call (715) 555–0205 or email careers@uwporterfalls.edu during the fall and spring terms, or sign in to MyPorter to send a message or book a time. If it turns out another office owns the question, they will route it rather than send you back to the start.
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.