July 25 Weekly Message for New Families

Bottom Line, Up Front

  • Room and Roommate assignments
  • Mailbox number assignments
  • Vehicle registration information
  • Consider tuition insurance
  • Pre-Wall Street Career Track Zoom meeting
  • Sustainability Leadership Group (SLG)
  • Please consider your student’s privacy re: sharing information online
  • ICYMI
    • Tuition is due August 1
    • Have you talked about access to your student’s grades?

Dear parents and families of incoming students,

Your Deacs will be arriving on campus in just a few weeks. As we get ever closer to Move-In, there is more and more we need to share with our families:

Room and roommate assignments

Room assignments will come out soon. For many students (or their parents/families), when you see their housing assignment, one of the first things you do is a Google/Instagram/Twitter search for the roommate to see what you can find out about them. You may discover that this person seems to be a lot like your Deac (and that seems comforting) — or that they are quite different (which might feel disconcerting). Take a few deep breaths and remember a couple of important things:

  • Students were assigned based on presumptive compatibility from the Housing and Dining Application. Help your Deac trust the matching process. A lot of what makes for a happy roommate pairing is similar ideas on how they want to use the room — not whether they share the same taste in music, agree on politics, share the same race/religion/sexual orientation/national origin, whether they think they want to be Greek, etc. As a reminder, room and roommate assignments are made without regard to race, religion, sexual orientation or national origin, and we do not assign siblings as roommates.
  • Part of the process of college is to expand the mind and gain new experiences — in that respect, a roommate who is very different can be a wonderful way for your student to expand their horizons.
  • Nearly everyone has something on social media that is not representative of who they truly are. (Your Deac’s roommate might equally be looking at what is out on the internet about your student and having similar unfounded worries!) Don’t put too much stake in social media posts or pictures — and instead encourage your student to spend some time trying to get to know their new roommate. The keys here are for students to foster good communication, make an effort to connect, and keep an open mind.
  • It is a myth that roommates have to be best friends; peaceable coexistence is the goal (friendship on top of that is a bonus).
  • Parents and families, my best and most well-intentioned advice is that in matters of roommates, your best role is to be neutral like Switzerland and don’t weigh in. Allow your student and their roommate to work things out, bringing in the RA (Resident Adviser) as needed to help mediate issues once the school year begins.
  • Another area of concern is that students hoped for a different assignment (e.g., they wanted a single but got a double, which is typically just a matter of demand exceeding supply, or wishing for a different building, etc.). Each building has its pros and cons — some rooms bigger, some renovated more recently, etc. — but they are all very liveable (in fact, I have lived in 3 of the 7 first-year halls and liked each in its own way).
  • Given that we have 1,400+ students, Residence Life and Housing staff does not have the capacity to take individual room measurements for your student’s room configuration, bed/desk size, etc. Thank you for your understanding in not making those requests. However, students will receive a Roomie link with their housing assignment, which will allow them to see their room in 3D! Students are encouraged to use the platform to visualize, plan and design their room before their arrival (this is a great time for students to start connecting/collaborating with their roommates on how they’ll share their new space!) You can also visit Residence Life and Housing’s website to learn more about each building.

Finally, I’d urge patience and understanding that students’ room assignments will not be changed (either to a new hall or a new roommate), so your students (or you!) should not ask Residence Life and Housing for changes. Instead, students should focus on getting to know their roommate and embracing their new community.

Mailbox assignments

  • Student mailbox numbers will be assigned around August 1 and will be available in WIN’s Internal Directory. You can find how to address mail or packages to students on our Mail Services website.
    • NOTE: Depending on whether you use US Mail or FedEx/UPS/DHL, there are two different zip codes, 27109 and 27106, respectively. This is not a typo. There are two zip codes depending on the carrier. Please follow the formats given on the Mail Services website.
  • Determine whether you will ship items to campus. If so, please allow enough time for any packages to be sent to campus in time for move-in. Please note: due to traffic and parking issues on Move-in Day, no deliveries can be made on Wednesday, August 23.
  • One option for shipping to campus is Storage Scholars, a student entrepreneurship venture. You can read more about their offerings here.

Vehicle registration information

First year student vehicle registration will begin Tuesday, August 1 at 9 a.m. To register your vehicle, visit the WFU Parking Portal. The parking website is also a great place to find information about parking during certain events like Thanksgiving, Winter Break or Spring Break.

If you have a transfer student who is a sophomore, junior, or senior, you will find vehicle registration information here.

Consider tuition insurance

Have you considered tuition insurance? Wake Forest is always concerned about students who suffer serious illness and accidents and have to leave the University before a semester is completed. In many instances, it means not only the loss of time invested in studies, but also the loss of the semester’s costs.

  • Wake Forest offers an elective tuition insurance plan through A.W.G. Dewar, Inc. that will help minimize financial loss if a student suffers a serious illness or accident and must withdraw before the end of a semester.
  • The deadline to enroll is August 27. Learn more.

Pre-Wall Street Career Track Zoom meeting

Families and students of the Class of 2027 are invited to attend an information session on August 3 at 5  p.m. via Zoom to learn more about the Pre-Wall Street Career track. The track is open to first year students interested in exploring a career in the financial industry.

The Pre‐Wall Street Career Track provides early and focused professional preparation for qualified Wake Forest students intending to pursue careers in Investment Banking, Asset Management, Sales & Trading, and Private Equity on a global basis.

Please join us by registering for the Zoom call to learn more about the opportunities via the track. The session will be recorded and provided upon request for families who cannot attend.

For questions or to request the recording, contact Program Director, Marty Malloy (malloym@wfu.edu).

Sustainability Leadership Group (SLG)

SLG ’27: Building Leadership for Sustainability — This group is exclusively for first-year students and is designed for new Deacs to develop skills and experience needed to address some of the most pressing issues facing our world today. Through its three pillars of leadership, education, and community, the program provides a select group of students with a fun, tight-knit, and collaborative environment where they can discover ways to make a lasting impact on campus and beyond. Interested students should apply by August 22 for priority consideration (final deadline: September 10). Students can learn more here!

Please consider your student’s privacy re: sharing information online

The University is bound to protect students’ privacy via laws like FERPA. I also want to humbly suggest that parents and families should consider students’ privacy as well. We know there are many ways that families connect to each other — you might have other Wake families in your hometown that you socialize with, you may have traded cell phone numbers with other Wake families and have a group chat set up, or you may have joined a parenting message board/Facebook group/online forum, etc.

New student housing assignments came out a few weeks ago for my ’27’s school. On their Class of 2027 message board for new families, some people started excitedly posting “My student is in [building name, room number.]. Who else will be on this hall?” and others would share their student’s new address.

As a mom, I totally get it. We want to know which other families might come to know our student in the halls and make those connections. As an administrator, I’d encourage you to ask your student’s permission before you share information about them online. There may be reasons your student DOESN’T want the world to know which hall/room they are in. (Tables turned, we as family members might not like having our kids share our home address online with a group of other people we don’t know).

Our kiddos also may not want us to ask [loving and well-intended] questions in an online/public forum (even if it is a closed group) about what may feel like sensitive topics to them: “does the Student Health Service fill prescriptions for acne medication/antidepressants/ADHD/birth control?” “Can anyone recommend a counselor at the counseling center?” “Anyone else have a super-shy student?” “I’m worried because it seems like everyone has found a friend group except my son” etc.

So talk to your student about their comfort level with you sharing details about them — even if you think it is no big deal, it might feel like a violation of their privacy to them. And a reminder that for those super-sensitive questions they might not want you to ask publicly, you can always email parents@wfu.edu and we can help you (either by answering, or directing you to someone who can), or you can use the Who to Contact for… website to find the right office.

Perhaps I am being sensitive to this because my ’27 Wolfpack is very independent and wants to control his own college narrative. Please know that my heart is in the right place in sharing these thoughts with y’all 🙂

ICYMI

Tuition is due August 1; see payment methods

Have you talked about access to your student’s grades?

  • If you want to be able to see your student’s grades, you must talk to them about them granting you FERPA Proxy Access — this allows administrators to share information about grades or other aspects of your student’s experience. Students have to grant this access to you. (Note: there are other offices who require their own FERPA release for students to allow staff to talk to designated family members/other people, including Residence Life and Housing.)

Parting thoughts

We’ll be back next week with our regularly-scheduled message for incoming families. In case you missed last week’s message, you can view our archive here.

With best wishes,

Betsy Chapman, Ph.D. (’92, MA ’94)
Executive Director of Family Communications

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