How it works
It is an accommodation, not a formal leave of absence: you stay enrolled and funded, but deadlines shift, an assistantship's duties are covered or paused, and instructors arrange incompletes or adjusted timelines. Request it through the Graduate School with your advisor's acknowledgement, ideally before the birth or placement.
Both parents
The accommodation is available to any graduate student who becomes a parent, not only the one giving birth. It can be combined with the university's other family supports — lactation rooms, the child and family center, emergency funds — and with FMLA where a student also holds an employee appointment.
In and around Porter Falls
Porter's eight graduate programs are small and applied — most students are working in the Valley while they study — and the Graduate School office in Millwright Hall keeps the handbooks and funding notices in one place.
The practical details
What it provides: An accommodation period (commonly six weeks) of relief from coursework, assistantship duties, and program milestones, without withdrawing. Funding & status: Assistantship stipend and health coverage continue during the accommodation; enrollment status and visa status are protected. Timeline: Milestone clocks (candidacy, time-to-degree) pause for the period. 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 Graduate School (Millwright Hall, Room 320). Call (715) 555–0225 or email gradschool@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.