@williamNYC - agreed that people signing up for housing before they’ve made their decision is not helpful to UMD for planning purposes. My son called UMD admissions office on Monday. The person he spoke to specifically told him that he should neither activate his UMD portal account nor sign up for housing until after he has made the decision to commit to UMD. So, while it seems the system may let you get around that, it isn’t actually what they want (going by what they told my son). Makes sense to me - the check list is numbered in order: item 4 is accept your offer, item 5 is activate your account, item 6 is sign up for housing… My son is going to wait until he’s sure about his decision. I understand that others may decide to handle it differently.
Thanks @PA_Mom for confirming that! Makes sense that we shouldn’t burden UMD with admin work before we are committed to the school. We are going to proceed in an orderly fashion as well. 
@PA_Mom Wow, that’s very interesting and very helpful to know!
Perhaps changing to the Coalition App this year may have indeed resulted in changes for how they do housing sign-up as well…?
I believe everything else posted still holds to be true…
@maryversity - I’ve found many of your posts extremely helpful, so I’m glad to pass along the information we learned from admissions this week.
I wouldn’t recommend using ourumd.edu since it’s very old and has not been updated in the past several years. I would suggest using plannetterp.com , which is similar to ourumd.edu, but is active.
Haha, yes, I stand corrected, that is definitely another update to the list I posted! To be fair, @whenyoubelieve had already pointed that out, so I was including that in my thought that “everything else posted still holds to be true”…but it is definitely worth bringing up again! 