WGU gives you two kinds of faculty, and using the right one saves weeks. Your Program Mentor is assigned to your whole degree: they guide your pace, plan your term, keep you on track, and meet you by phone on a regular cadence. Course Instructors are different — each course has its own, and they are subject-matter experts you go to for help understanding the material and the tasks in that specific course. Mentor for the journey; instructor for the content.
What the Program Mentor does
Your Program Mentor stays with you across the degree. Their job is progress and success: planning each term with you, keeping your pace realistic, talking through resources and assessments, and stepping in when you stall. They are your first call about the shape of your degree, not the details of a single task.
What Course Instructors do
Every course has its own Instructors, who are subject-matter experts in that content. When a concept will not click or a task instruction is ambiguous, they are who you contact. Students routinely underuse them, waiting for the next mentor call instead of getting unblocked on the material the same day.
How often you meet your mentor
The cadence tracks your progress. In your first term you and your mentor speak by phone weekly until you reach on-time progress. After that, if you are meeting and maintaining on-time progress, the calls move to at least every two weeks. If you are behind or on financial-aid warning, they return to weekly until you recover.
Using both well
The trap is routing everything through your mentor. Use the mentor for pace, planning, and motivation, and go straight to the course instructor for content and task questions. Getting the split right is one of the quiet reasons some WGU students accelerate and others stall.
Where a tutor fits
WGU faculty guide and evaluate; we help you do the work between calls: understanding a task, building a draft to the rubric, and using your mentor and instructor time efficiently rather than for things you can prepare in advance.
Sources and verification
Facts on this page come from official sources; anything that matters is worth checking against the originals, because program details change:
- www.wgu.edu: Western Governors University's official site
- cm.wgu.edu: the WGU Knowledge Center and Student Policy Handbook
- www.nwccu.org: the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, WGU's institutional accreditor
- apastyle.apa.org: APA Style, the standard for written tasks