July 22 Weekly Update: Housing and The Forest

Bottom Line, Up Front

• Upcoming key dates or action items for families 
• Room and Roommate assignments
• Mailbox number assignments
• Vehicle registration information

Dear parents and families of incoming students,

Your Deacs will be arriving on campus in just a few weeks. Are you getting excited?!?! We are!

Upcoming key dates or action items for families 

Here’s what you should know this week.

• Academic accommodations and CLASS (Center for Learning, Access, and Student Success): On Wednesday July 23rd at 6 p.m. and Wednesday, July 30th at 6 p.m., CLASS will offer a Meet the Director virtual webinar; register here. Dr. Michael Shuman will provide information on the accommodations process and be ready to answer any questions you may have. Since students may ask individual disability related questions, these sessions will not be recorded. 

• Ensure your student buys their textbooks/course materials. It is recommended that they buy through our University Bookstore.
  
  Our Bookstore offers textbooks with many options to choose from: new or used, rentals (save up to 80%), digital, and a price match (check bookstore website for details). In addition, often textbooks have various editions, and if your Deac tries to source their textbooks on their own, they may not find the right edition. But if your student buys from the Bookstore, they will get 100% of their course materials just by entering their Student ID. 
• Reminder: Fall tuition is due August 1. Fall tuition and fees were billed the first week of July; this activity is visible in Workday on the Student Financials App. See this helpful job aid for Workday student financials.
  
  • Important: if your Deac has not made you a Third Party User yet, please encourage them to do so. It’s to their benefit to have someone else see when tuition is due! This is also what allows us to speak with you about your student’s billing details.
    
  • Log into the QuikPay portal to make a payment for your student’s tuition. You’ll then be prompted to enroll in or decline GradGuard tuition insurance. The GradGuard tuition insurance plan ensures up to a 100% tuition refund throughout the semester for tuition, fees, meal plan, and housing (up to $50,000.00) in case of withdrawal due to accident, illness, mental health, death of a payer, or loss of employment of a payer. The deadline to enroll in tuition insurance for the Fall is 8/24.
    
• Reminder of Pre-Wall Street Career track Zoom session (August 6 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 session will be recorded and provided upon request for families who cannot attend. For questions or to request the recording if you cannot attend on August 6, contact the Program Director, Marty Malloy, at malloym@wfu.edu.
• FYI: First-year student vehicle registration will begin Friday, August 1 at 9:00 a.m. EST. For your student to register a vehicle, they will need to visit the WFU Parking Portal. This website is also a great place to find information about parking during certain events like Thanksgiving, Winter Break, and Spring Break as well as details about airport shuttle service. PLEASE NOTE: To access the parking portal, your Deac must specifically select their WFU Google account to log in. Otherwise, they will not be able to access the portal. All other Google users must be logged out completely.

Room and roommate assignments

• Room and roommate assignments (if applicable) were released on July 10 in the Housing Portal. Read my best advice about room assignments and roommates in this recent Daily Deac.
  • Once your student arrives on campus, if they have a roommate, they will be expected to complete a roommate agreement. Your student’s RA will help facilitate that process; these are critical conversations about the boundaries for your Deac and their roommate.
• Students received 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.
• Students with roommates should be connecting/collaborating with their roommates to introduce themselves and begin planning how they’ll share their new space. Note: some students might be on vacation, working a busy summer job, etc., so encourage your Deac to please give their roommate grace and be patient if they have reached out and have not heard back from them yet 🙂
• You can also visit Residence Life and Housing’s website to learn more about each building. 
• One of the common questions we get from new families after school begins is “should the RA (Resident Adviser) be helping my student do X or Y?” The role of the RA has expanded over the years, and it would be helpful for both students and families to learn about the role of the RA in order to have clear expectations.

Mailbox assignments

• Student mailbox numbers will be assigned around August 1 and will be available in Workday. Students will need to:
  • Log into Workday
  • Click their profile picture in the top right corner
  • Select ‘View Profile’
  • Select ‘Contact’
  • Under Institutional Contact Information, their on-campus address with their mailbox number will be listed.
• You can find how to address mail or packages to students on our Mail Services website.
• Determine whether you will ship items to campus. 
  • If so, the Mail Services office requests that families refrain from shipping mail or other items to your student earlier than two weeks prior to their arrival on campus. Please note: due to traffic and parking issues on Move-in Day, no deliveries can be made on Wednesday, August 20. 
  • Remember that Storage Scholars is our official shipping partner; you can also work with them to ship items to campus and have them delivered right to your Deac’s room. Their deadline for sign up is July 27.

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