The Office of Residential Life has revamped the housing petition system this year. Instead of using pencil and paper, all students applying for housing with ResLife must petition for rooms online using WebSTAC.
According to Assistant Director of Residential Life Rhonda Kiely, who is in charge of room assignments, the new system was implemented not only for the technological benefit, but also to make the process of selecting housing more convenient.
“We’re trying to give a little bit more flexibility back to the students,” said Kiely.
Lottery numbers for room selection will become available on Thursday, Feb. 22 in a new section in WebSTAC’s menu under the header “Campus Housing.” Additionally, this section will include the online petition creation system.
To create a petition, each group of potential roommates must designate a contact person, who is responsible for filling out the online form, ranking housing options and formally inviting the roommates to the petition by entering their e-mail addresses into a special field in the form.
In order for these e-mail addresses to be made available to the housing process, all students must type in a confirmation word at the top of the main petition page to allow their e-mail addresses to be used in the housing process. According to Kiely, this is because roommates can be added to the petition only by typing in their e-mail addresses into a field in the form.
The online form also provides a field to add any special requests, comments and personal options that students may have regarding their housing preferences.
Upon completing the form, the contact person must click a button to formally create the petition. Once the petition is created, invited roommates will receive an e-mail asking them to confirm or deny the invitation in WebSTAC. After all roommates have agreed, the petition must be submitted to ResLife within a range of dates specific to the round in which the students are applying.
Making the transition to an online housing petition system allowed ResLife to add new features to streamline the process. According to Kiely, one such feature allows students to make modifications to their petitions online any time before the final petition must be submitted.
“We had a lot of people who wanted to come in and change things,” said Kiely. “And now they have a little more flexibility in doing that.”
Also, when ranking residence halls in order of preference, students must now provide a rank for all the available options in a certain round instead of ranking only their top few choices. This, according to Kiely, takes a lot of the guesswork out of the process for ResLife.
“What would happen before was that a lot of students would only mark one or two things. So that forced us to have to choose their order for them,” said Kiely. “Now the student has to fill it all out because if they didn’t, they’re going to get an error message.”
Another feature notifies students if they have been dropped from the petition. For example, if the contact person deletes the petition, all students invited to that petition will receive an e-mail notifying them about the deletion.
Kiely noted that all petitions must be filled out completely, and no empty space can be left in a petition for new or transfer students. “The room selection process is strictly for those students who are returning, who have lived with us this year and are returning to live with us next year,” said Kiely.
For students who are having difficulty finding a last roommate, there is the online roommate finder, which allows students to search for potential roommates. It can be found at http://reslife.wustl.edu/finder.
ResLife will be hosting information sessions to discuss the housing petition system with students and to field questions. These sessions will occur Wednesday, Feb. 28 and Tuesday, March 20 at 6:30 p.m. in Friedman Lounge.
More information about the new online petition system, including important deadlines and eligibility rules, can be found at ResLife’s Web site, http://reslife.wustl.edu/housing_selection.