To ensure timely graduation, all first year students intending to major in one of the Biology degrees should take both BIO 105 and CHEM 105 during their first semester.

Academic Advising Occurs in Phases

Your officially assigned advisor’s name appears on the first page of your TitanWeb Advisement Report. You will likely go through at least two advisors during your college career at UW-Oshkosh. One will be a UARC staffer and the other will be a Biology faculty member.

Your First Advisor

New freshmen and transfer students are assigned a general advisor in the UW-Oshkosh Undergraduate Advising Resource Center (UARC). Your UARC advisor will help you plan your first semester(s) at UW-Oshkosh based on your stated interests (including your major, if you declare one right away). This person likely has a load of several hundred students to advise. They are not an expert on the biology or microbiology curriculum.

Your Biology Faculty Advisor

To qualify for faculty advisor assignment, you must declare a major in the Biology program (email advising@uwosh.edu or call (920) 424-1268 to declare or change a major) AND complete the following courses:

• BIO 105: Biological Concepts – Unity (Intro Biology)
• CHEM 105: General Chemistry I*

*The Chem 105 requirement may be waived in some circumstances if a student completes Chem 101 with a very high grade and has completed Math 104 or higher. However, this must be confirmed with the Chemistry program and the current instructor of Chem 106.

Bring your TitanWeb advisement report showing completion of these courses to the main biology office (Halsey 330) and ask to be assigned a faculty advisor. You may request a certain faculty member but, because we try to keep advisor loads evenly spread at no more than 20 to 30 students per advisor, your request may not be able to be honored. If you plan to graduate in four years, be sure to visit your faculty advisor about once a semester! 

Our faculty and staff specialize in certain advising areas, as follows. Please attend their office hours or email them for an advising appointment.

• Pre-Health: Krause
• General Biology: Churchill, Dorn, Kurtz, Ladwig, Lucas, Michalski, Shors, Stelzer
• Biomedical Science: Churchill, Krause, Kurtz, Michalski, Mueller-Spitz
• Cellular, Molecular, & Professional: Dorn, Lucas
• Environmental Health: Mueller-Spitz
• Ecology/Organismal: Ladwig, Stelzer
• Microbiology: Krause, Mueller-Spitz, Shors
• Pre-Vet: Kurtz
• Radiologic Science: Janquart
• Medical Laboratory Science: Janquart

Once assigned to a faculty advisor, the student remains with that advisor unless either the student or the advisor requests a change. Exceptions occur when there is a new faculty hire, a resignation, or a sabbatical. Reassignment in such cases may be made by the administrative assistants without consultation of the faculty or student(s) affected.

Peer Advising

PALs are student advisers who work out of the UARC. In addition, biology or microbiology based student organizations on campus can put you in touch with a network of peers and mentors that provide priceless opportunities to get “been there, done that” advising. These organizations are:

• Biology and Microbiology Club. For students with any interest in these fields.
• Pre-health clubs: Students with specific healthcare interests should look at Involve, and club meetings are often advertised by posters on the walls of first floor Halsey Science Center.

Career Advising

Your faculty advisor may be able to give you career advice, but don’t neglect the many resources offered elsewhere on campus. UW-Oshkosh has a very active Career & Professional Development, including exercises to prepare you for the all-important interview process. You will retain Career & Professional Development office access even after you graduate! Finally, the Counseling Center also offers advice to enrolled students. Click here for a pdf of potential careers in biological sciences.

Appeal to Repeat Policy (Biology Program)

Requests for the Fall and Spring semesters are not processed until the first week of the semester. Students who wish to repeat need to be watching TitanWeb and if a seat becomes available, come to the Biology office (Halsey 330) right away. As long as the seat is still open when you get to the office, we will set it down and help you complete the necessary paperwork.

Requests for Summer term are able to be processed right away, however, you must come to the Biology office (Halsey 330) to complete the process and a seat must be available when you arrive.

What to do if the class is full

You want a BIO class, but it’s showing up “full” on TitanWeb. Now what?

Don’t waste time asking the instructor to sign you in, because instructors in Biology aren’t allowed to do that.

Biology uses the electronic waitlist feature in TitanWeb. Classes with an active waitlist will display a yellow triangle next to the section(s). Click here for step-by-step instructions for how to wait-list a class that is full.

Things to be aware of:

• All sections of a class must be full before the waitlist is activated.
• All prerequisite requirements must be met in order to waitlist a given class.
• Students must have an active enrollment appointment to waitlist a class.
• Only one lab section can be wait-listed per lecture.
• The total maximum credits allowed for waitlisting is 11.

The Biology administrative assistants will notify waitlisted students IN TURN if/when a seat opens up in a waitlisted course. Notifications will be sent to the student’s UWO email with instructions for enrollment. The student will have 24 hours from receipt of the email to complete the process before being dropped from the list.