<p>Not to hijack the thread, but what would you do if you figured out your D would be alone in a dorm for several days before the RA or other students moved in. I wouldn’t stay in an empty hotel without a desk clerk, why is it OK to put a kid alone in a dorm? (Yes, the school says others won’t arrive for X number of days.)</p>
<p>mom22039</p>
<p>Will a Hall Director be there? (Hall Directors are graduate students or staff members who live in a dorm and superivise RAs and otherwise manage the building.)</p>
<p>I’d suggest starting a thread about this to get good responses.</p>
<p>I second Northstarmom’s post. I don’t like making these kinds of calls and neither do either of my kids. But we will do it after we set a date for ourself. One day is not going to make that big of a difference to the college’s residence hall life, but will make a difference to your son.</p>
<p>I also think that part of letting our kids grow up is learning to not step in just because we know that it will be easier or faster for us to deal with the problem because of the belief that XXX doesn’t take complaints from students as seriously as complaints from parents.</p>
<p>Lets take a poll here. Would you rather make that phone call and possiblely get a decent housing for your kid? Or would you rather teach your kid a lesson and possibly have your kid sleep on a cot at some tempoary housing for few months?</p>
<p>I’d make the call myself.</p>
<p>i’d be point blank forced to call</p>
<p>I’d let my kid make the call. Having to live in temporary housing is not a life threatening problem. The potential lessons in having my kid handle this situation would be worth the risk of his being in temporary housing.</p>
<p>With Northstarmom here: I’d have my kid make the call figuring it would be a valuable lesson in dealing with the paperwork and snafus to come. Temp housing is something that somebody’s kid is going to have to deal with it sounds like. And “bad” freshman housing is not the end of the world. (I know, I spent my freshman year in one of the “bad” freshman dorms; most of the kids in my dorm wouldn’t have traded the experience even though our classmates spent the year telling us how bad our dorm was even though they didn’t live there.)</p>
<p>Making a phone call isn’t going to get someone a better room than they would otherwise have. That’s not how a housing office works - that is, they don’t have some sort of staff policy that they assign all the best rooms to the people who call and nag the most.</p>
<p>It makes sense to call and inquire as to status. It is likely that the housing office staff is acutely aware of whatever housing issues they face this year and yes, they are probably waiting for information from the bursar’s office as to which students can be dropped because they’ve failed to pay their fees on time. </p>
<p>My daughter spent two successive years on “housing waitlist” purgatory, at a very expensive private college – not learning her room assignment until the 2nd week of August, 3 weeks before the start of school. One year it worked out great – she got an amazing room, the best room in a well-located suite --and got along well with her suitemates. Another year it was not so great – she got a room on a hall in dorm she didn’t want, among students whose company she definitely did not enjoy.</p>
<p>But in both situations the housing office was well aware of her situation. They assign spaces as they come up.</p>
<p>If housing is guaranteed by the school they will provide it. Even if it means putting the kid up at a hotel.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I might go with Option C – sit in the room with kid on the phone and pass notes if I have suggestions. If it’s clear he is not being taken seriously, then I would get on the phone. But I think it would be a good practice run for the kid because, as someone said, he might have to deal with some things without parental help.</p>
<p>Offer to handle it as a speakerphone call with your kid. Maybe they have him assigned to a room and just haven’t disclosed it yet, maybe they don’t have enough rooms and are juggling options, maybe a dorm remodeling project is running late – but my guess is that they can and will tell you what’s up, especially if you call first thing in the morning before the office gets the peak volume of calls.</p>
<p>Personal experience here, when I called I was able to get a single for D1 in a nicer dorm. It’s not life threatening to live in a temporary housing, but it avoided a lot of unnecessary whining.</p>
<p>I’d most definitely let them call. Whining is the price they pay for not doing it themselves. My mother was one who would step in and do it for us. My sister, to this day, blames her for the fact that she still isn’t very good at it. My kids may or may not be good at it, but it isn’t my fault that they aren’t.</p>
<p>I learned this lesson when my oldest was in elementary school and he looked at me and said “let me do it myself”.</p>
<p>I just want to say that if they have assigned him a room, its possible that they can’t disclose the information via telephone. I called my housing office when I couldn’t access my room assignment (system problem) and the woman on the other end wasn’t sure if she could release my information despite the fact I had given her my school ID number and my full name (proving I was me). She actually had to call me back because she needed to ask permission. She ended up not being able to tell me over the phone and the only advice she could give me was check my assignment again and hoped it worked. Luckily the system was back up again so I could see. </p>
<p>Be warned that calling may not get you any new information…</p>
<p>"Personal experience here, when I called I was able to get a single for D1 in a nicer dorm. It’s not life threatening to live in a temporary housing, but it avoided a lot of unnecessary whining. "</p>
<p>I didn’t care if my kids whined if they had learned an important life lesson.</p>
<p>I also don’t feel obligated to listen to kids’ whining. The ironic flip side is that now that sons are grown, they don’t listen to my whining either.</p>
<p>It’s Wednesday…did he call? Does he have a room?</p>
<p>I would tell my kid that if you are polite and respectful people will generally not be annoyed by you and then have him/her call.</p>
<p>Am I the only one who has ever had a situation like this where the person in authority wasn’t aware of the problem? That an email slipped into a spam folder or someone who was supposed to do something got side-tracked or some other weird thing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve agonized over situations like this only to be told “I’m so sorry, we didn’t realize you hadn’t been contacted, why didn’t you call sooner.”</p>
<p>“Am I the only one who has ever had a situation like this where the person in authority wasn’t aware of the problem? That an email slipped into a spam folder or someone who was supposed to do something got side-tracked or some other weird thing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve agonized over situations like this only to be told “I’m so sorry, we didn’t realize you hadn’t been contacted, why didn’t you call sooner.””</p>
<p>Yes, I’ve encountered that a lot. That’s also how I learned the importance of making such calls, something I didn’t start having to do until I went to college and couldn’t rely on Mom to do this for me. Back in the old days, due to the lack of cell phones, the Internet, and even answering machines, students were less likely to reach out to parents to handle this sort of situation.</p>
<p>Same here. My son’s AP scores were not posted on his university’s website, and he needed them to be, so he could petition for credit for the first calculus class (since he’d already signed up for the second one!). I finally suggested he call them, and it turned out the school had received the scores but not associated them with him! When I looked at his test results, I noticed that he’d put his birthdate down as x/x/2010, so that’s probably what happened.</p>
<p>How not to do things, by “X” U. UW always has full dorms and students in temporary housing (dens and Ag short course dorms). They tell those students when everyone gets the housing assignment and move people as students fail to show, drop out, etc. Why couldn’t this U at least tell students “we know you’re coming but you’re on the waitlist and we will tell you the room as soon as we can, this may be late August…” They could give a finite date for updating, at least.</p>