What a mentor actually does
A mentor is a guide, not a tutor or a counselor — helping a new student find a study group, explaining how to actually use office hours, or just checking in when a first exam goes badly, with a clear sense of when to refer to a professional office instead.
Becoming a mentor
Any student with a semester of good academic standing can apply; selected mentors complete a required training weekend before fall covering listening skills, referral boundaries and mandatory reporting basics, and receive a small stipend.
In and around Porter Falls
Support at Porter is deliberately clustered on the first two levels of Halvorsen Library so a student can move from one kind of help to another without leaving the building or re-explaining the situation. Walk-in hours run late Monday through Thursday during the semester, and everything can also be booked through MyPorter.
The practical details
Pairing: By major where possible, otherwise by interest. Commitment: Weekly contact for the first semester. Training: Mentors complete a required training weekend before fall. 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 Student Success Center (Halvorsen Library, Level 1). Call (715) 555–0170 or email success@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.