Know your appointment time
Registration opens in waves by earned credits: graduate students and seniors first, then juniors, sophomores, and first-year students, each with an assigned date and time in MyPorter. You can register any time after your window opens — but the best sections of popular courses go in the first hours of each wave, so being ready matters.
Clear holds a week early
Advising holds, billing holds, immunization holds, and a few others all block registration and none of them clear instantly. Check the Holds panel in MyPorter now. An advising hold means you must meet your adviser; book that appointment as soon as the schedule opens, not the day before you register.
Build the plan before your window
Use the planner to build your ideal schedule and two backups. For each course, note the CRN, the meeting time, and one alternate section. When your window opens you are entering numbers, not browsing — that is the difference between getting the schedule you planned and taking whatever is left.
Waitlists
A waitlisted course holds your place in line; when a seat opens, the system emails your Porter address and you have a short window (often 24 hours) to add it yourself before it passes to the next student. Waitlists do not auto-enroll you into a time conflict, and being on three waitlists for the same slot is fine as a strategy.
Waitlisted credits do not count toward full-time status for aid until they convert.
Permission numbers and overrides
A permission number from the department overrides a closed section, a prerequisite the system cannot see (a transfer course, a concurrent course), or an instructor-consent requirement. Request it from the department, not the registrar, and use it before it expires. A credit-overload request (above 18 credits) goes to your adviser or dean.
If your plan falls apart
If a required course is genuinely full with no waitlist movement, email the department early and ask about additional sections, a permission number, or a substitute that keeps you on track. Departments watch demand in the first week and sometimes open seats. A calm, specific email in week one is far more effective than a panicked one in week three.
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.