CALS Academic Advising Resources

• CALS
  • CALS Academic Policies & Forms
  • CALS major declaration form: students cannot declare a major in CALS without consulting the advisor for the major. Once you have determined that the student can declare in your major, complete this form. CALS Academic Affairs staff will process the request and send an email to the student and advisor to confirm when the declaration has been processed. *CALS AA will add your access to this form
  • Double major or dual degree paperwork can be found on the academic policies and forms webpage on the CALS website 
• Advising tools
  • The Guide: is the official source of academic program offerings at UW-Madison and their curricular requirements and policies.
  • Starfish: tool used by students to schedule advising meetings with advisors across campus
  • Advising Gateway and Notes view student information, academic background, and review notes from others and document your interactions with students 
  • DARS, Degree Audit Report System: tool used by students and advisors to track degree progress and to view what requirements a student could have remaining for their current program or any other major or certificate on campus
  • DARS X: form used by advisors if a curricular exception is needed for a student in a major-specific requirement. Exceptions should be rare and decisions to make an exception should be made in consultation with your major faculty or director, whomever the department chair deems is an appropriate decision-maker based on knowledge of the curriculum. 
  • Transferology lab: tool to look up transfer course equivalencies for UW-Madison. Transferology is the student-facing tool and the lab is the advisor-facing site
  • Handshake: advisors will have limited access within Handshake unless you are an alum but you will often refer students to the tool. A free job-search and career event tool for all UW–Madison students. It assists students in connecting with employers, finding jobs and internships, and learning about career and internship fairs, employer meet and greets, and more!
  • GPA Calculator
• Data
  • Data Center in the Student Information System (SIS) can be used to see primarily currently enrolled student information
  • Repository for Administrative Dashboards and Reports (RADAR): repository of self-service institutional data solutions for individuals who work with curricular, student, other data. Be sure to request access to “Student Data – Restricted” using this form.
  • Tableau: used to view data visualizations of campus-level and sometimes major-specific data points.
  • OACS Data Catalog: this tool is designed to be a one-stop shop for your data-related needs, offering a comprehensive index of data reports related to the work of advising, career services, and learning support community members
• Office of the Registrar
  • How-Tos for students on using Course Search & Enroll, DARS, Degree Planner, etc.  
  • Guide to enrollment actions, dates and deadlines, and which tool students use to do these actions 
• Academic dates and deadlines
• Academic calendar

• Schedule a meeting with Tera Holtz from CALS Advising Services for a college onboarding meeting and to get your CALS t-shirt!
• Schedule a meeting with Assistant Dean for Academic Policies and Programs, Megan Ackerman-Yost for help requesting access to the appropriate tools in the Student Information System (SIS), DARS, and DARS-X. Additional details about these tools are under Advising Tools. There are a large number of trainings required for SIS access, so we recommend getting started with this right away.
• Sign up for Advising Notes System training. If there is not a training scheduled within your first two weeks, contact Jeffrey Shokler to ask about an individual training. Connect with Megan Ackerman-Yost if you have any issues getting a training in your first couple weeks.
• Contact Debbie Moy from the Office of the Registrar to be asked to be given an advisor role in SIS.
• Once you have an advisor role, you can request to have your advisees assigned to you using the process outlined on this webpage.
• Order a name badge and business cards using DoIT Publishing and Printing Services. Your department admin or financial specialist should be able to assist with purchasing these but if you need assistance, please contact CALS Academic Affairs.
• Review the Guide pages for all of your academic programs to determine where contact information is listed for all of your programs (typically, the contact box, People page, and sometimes Advising and Careers). Contact the Guide editors email (copying academicplanning@cals.wisc.edu on the email) to request updates as soon as possible with your information. Here’s a link to more information on Guide updates.
• Submit a form to request access to Starfish, the scheduling tool that campus uses for student advising meetings.
• Email lists that you will want to join or will automatically be added to:
  • Join Advisor-link – this is the all campus advising community email list. Note that it does get a lot of traffic so you may want to update your settings to provide you with a digest, but please note if any urgent notices about advising tool access or anything goes out, you may be delayed in seeing it. Otherwise, we recommend creating a folder you can just drag emails into until you’re more familiar with the items coming through and feel comfortable deleting what you don’t need more quickly. 
  • Join the Bioscience Advising Team (BAT) email list – this is a list of all bioscience-related advisors on campus. The community meets once or twice per semester and is a good opportunity to learn about issues related to the biosciences and share any updates from your program(s).
• You will be added by CALS Academic Affairs to the following lists:
  • CALS Advising Community email list and Team in Microsoft Teams – these include all CALS advisors and Academic Affairs staff and the email list includes a few campus partners as well.
    • During the academic year, you will receive an invitation to CALS Advising Community meetings which happen the first Thursday of every month. This is a gathering of all CALS advisors and occasionally campus partners and a variety of CALS AA staff.
  • CALS Advisors email list – this is an email list that only includes CALS advisors and Academic Affairs staff (no campus partners).
  • eCALS for Students Newsletter – this is a weekly newsletter during the academic year sent by CALS Academic Affairs to all undergraduate students in the college.

As you get settled in during your first few months, please schedule a brief introductory meeting with each unit in the CALS Office of Academic Affairs to learn more about their office, services provided to students, and how you might collaborate with them in your new role. The CALS Office of Academic Affairs units include the following, a contact for each service or program in the office is listed below to serve as a starting point to schedule these meetings, a directory can be found here. 

• Academic Programs & Policies: Megan Ackerman-Yost 
• CALS Advising Services: Tera Holtz 
• Career Services: Kristina Vack 
• Honors: Heather Mialik 
• Quickstart: Liza Chang 
• Recruitment and Outreach: Jane Duffstein 
• Scholarships: Alan Avila 
• Study Abroad: Brett Schieve 
• Student Engagement: Tom Browne

• Office of Academic & Career Success (OACS): a centralized office that supports campus advisors with trainings and tools to do their best work. Advisors do not report to this office.
• Office of Admissions: any questions about admissions, information for transfer students and re-entry students, students transferring credit from another institution to UW-Madison 
• Office of the Registrar (RO): questions regarding course scheduling, enrollment, grading, adding advisors and batch moves of advisees, student records, credit evaluation services, and anything student records
• Data, Academic Planning, & Institutional Research (DAPIR): support finding data, assessment reporting, program and curriculum planning
• Division of Information Technology (DoIT): campus level support for software and tech needs
• Office of Student Assistance and Support (OSAS): general student support and resource connection, contact to consult on report a student of concern
• Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards: academic and non-academic misconduct, contact to report or consult on any concerns
• Office of Student Financial Aid (OSFA): scholarships, loan questions, basic needs support 
• Bursar’s Office: questions about tuition, enrollment holds
• International Student Services (ISS): supports international students at all levels including immigration paperwork, enrollment verification, and community building/support 
• Veterans Services: provides support both logistical and community focused for active duty, veteran, and GI Bill eligible students 
• Multicultural Student Center (MSC): home of the main central hub for multicultural student orgs and the Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) Student Center, Black Cultural Center, Indigenous Student Center, Latinx Cultural Center 
• Division of Diversity, Equity and Educational Achievement (DDEEA): home of a variety of scholarship and support programs for students, faculty, and staff. Cohort programs like the PEOPLE Program, Posse, First Wave, and Mercile J. Lee Scholars program are based in the DDEEA.
• International Internship Program (IIP): campus’s central office for international internship program coordination
• International Academic Programs (IAP): campus’s central study abroad office any student on campus can participate in an IAP program 
• Transfer Transition Program (TTP): supports transfer students with programming and other non-academic support, home of the Transfer Engagement Center (TEC)
• Center for Pre-Health Advising (CPHA): an auxiliary advising office that supports students interested in any health pathways post-undergrad. They meet with students, host workshops and events, and manage a plethora of asynchronous resources to support health-interested students.
• Center for Pre-Law Advising (CPLA): an auxiliary advising office that supports students interested in any health pathways post-undergrad. They meet with students, host workshops and events, and manage a plethora of asynchronous resources to support health-interested students.
• Office of Student Transition and Family Engagement (OSTFE) runs the campus orientation program (SOAR), parent programming, and Wisconsin Welcome programming
• Center for Educational Opportunity (CeO): campus Trio program office focused on supporting first-generation and low income students at UW-Madison. Students participating in CeO will have an advisor from the program assigned to them in addition to their academic advisor.