Thought this might help some. Your mileage of course may vary:
Before/During Orientation:
Make hotel reservations early for Orientation and Move In (and any other special events for that matter… everything books pretty quickly for landmark events… and expect sticker shock for room rates).
Kid interested in season tix for football? Tell them to sign up early when student sales open. They are usually sold out in July. They can still get single game tix via lottery though.
Make sure their HS guidance dept. sends final transcripts to VT. Ditto on any DE coursework from community colleges. And be prepared for DE/Transfer credits to not all show up on VT transcript right away if you check unofficial transcript via guest access. They get flooded with transcripts in May/June. (Final info may not appear on VT transcript until after orientation).
Per above - make sure you bring a hard copy of all transcripts with you to orientation. If there is AP/IB, or DE credit that you know will transfer, talk with your student so they know what Pathways or other courses those credits cover. VT has a Pathways page that includes a planner so you can plug in credits accordingly. Advising is going to already have scheduled fall semester courses for your student prior to orientation, so student will need to know if a course is already covered by transfer credits so adjustments can be made during their advising session.
Pack your patience for Orientation. You will be surprised at the abundance of parents who have not read VT’s website and who will ask a lot of seemingly very basic questions. It is 1 1/2 days with a lot of info.
Go to Cabo Fish Taco for lunch, but go early!
Visit the Horticultural Garden. Take a walk around the Duck Pond. Buy a ridiculous amount of VT gear.
Great advice and totally agree! Since this is my second Hokie, I may skip the parent sessions and sit in Cabo Fish Taco most of the day LOL. Love their food and their margaritas!
@hope2have2Hokies So you’ve been through the torture of the same question being asked 5 separate times, with just a word or two changed? Good times. Taphouse has really good artichoke dip, if you need to walk north from Cabo to work off the margaritas.
@vamominvabeach Go to www.hokiesports.com and you can find the ticket information. Full season student tickets have sold out before the 2nd week of July the last 2 years. After that, students can sign up for the single game lottery before each home game.
@vamominvabeach have your incoming freshman watch their VT email closely. Upperclassmen have already had the opportunity to buy student season tickets, but for new freshmen they will get an email letting them know when their opportunity to buy opens up. As mentioned, you will want to buy those right away because they sell out fast.
I am seeing posts on the housing that some students are already selecting rooms (or have their timeslots next week). Do they not provide everybody with their timeslot right away? My son does not have a timeslot listed yet.
Also, some students/parents are talking about their schedule, but I don’t see where to see that, yet. My son’s online orientation isn’t until the first week of July, so perhaps why??
@HokieCrazy I believe housing timeslots are still rolled out in the same order as they are assigned - by when the student signed their housing contract. The first wave would be ED applicants. They don’t notify everyone of their slot at the same time.
You can’t access your son’s schedule because technically it doesn’t exist yet since he has not completed orientation and met virtually with his academic advisor. I would imagine it will be available to him either instantaneously during his advisor session or will post to his account within a day or so.
Admissions may be able to answer whether his HS transcript has been received, but be aware that in a normal year they usually don’t post transfer credits to your student’s VT transcript until a couple weeks after orientation. Once your son has his schedule provided, you should be able to access his VT transcript via your guest account. You can see if transfer credits have hit or not then. NOTE: this is why it’s VERY important to have your own copy of his transcript on hand for the advising session so you can communicate to the advisor if they have him scheduled for any courses that he’s “placed out” of due to transfer credit.
Thank you for your response. Regarding the transcript, I was really only concerned with the transcript from the perspective of validating our self-reported grades during the application process. All of my son’s transfer credits would be coming from AP Exams from Collegeboard. We have his pre-senior year ones already showing up, as a matter of fact.
This brings up another question for parents who have older students that might be able to provide a strategy. Since AP scores won’t be out until after my son creates his schedule, are there any good strategies to make sure he gets the classes he wants? For example, he’s unsure of whether he’s gotten a 4+ on his Chemistry. Should he overload his schedule with both Chemistry and whatever he’d take if he does place out, and then drop the corresponding class based on what he gets from College Board (mid-July, I believe)? Thoughts?
@HokieCrazy that seems like a good strategy, and since a lot of things are going online, probably won’t be hard to do (in terms of fitting together a schedule). If I recall, even for freshmen, once the schedule is set you can add and drop classes via the website starting in mid July (double check that because the window might be different for new freshmen).
I actually think they are asking the freshmen to set the schedule to begin with after you review it with your advisor. That should at least allow them to pick the actual class times and such. My son will be in a bit of a bind for a bunch of his classes, I think, because he’ll have a lot of sophomore classes on his schedule. They may already be pretty well booked up.
@HokieCrazy It’s common for students these days to bring in a lot of credits, so he won’t be alone and the advisor should be able to get him into what he needs. The good news is that after first semester schedules are done by a process called course request where they submit their preferred courses and then schedules are produced. My son has had really good luck getting everything he needs via course request, and then the add/drop process is easy if you need to change anything (search these threads for something called Course Pickle or Course Patrol, which are tools to notify you of openings in classes you want to add).
@HokieCrazy You mentioned that “We have his pre-senior year ones already showing up, as a matter of fact” - you’re referring to his HS transcript, correct? Just be sure you have a copy of that in hand when his advising session takes place. There’s a high % chance that advising will not have that data by the time his session takes place. They will have most of his schedule pre-set based on the info they have prior to the session… and unless something has changed recently, they will already have him plugged into the course day/time. As mentioned above, once add/drop opens back up he can make adjustments (July 13th is the date for returning students, it may be the same for incoming freshmen). CoursePickle works well.
I’m not sure how she would know that they were documented, unless she called and asked (or maybe they show up on the student account page now)? In 2018 the only way you could see what had transferred and been applied was by viewing the VT unofficial transcript and that didn’t go live until after course selection at orientation was completed. In our case admissions/registrar had the data but advising didn’t have it yet.
@ShenVal18 When my son started in 2018 we could go into the Degree Audit/pathways planner section of Hokiespa and see all transfer credits and AP credits. It was all there, and it was nice to know that VT had received everything before orientation and scheduling. If Hokiecrazy says she can see those credits I’m not sure why anyone would question that.
@rbc2018 We left the DAR and Hokiespa side of things to our student, so the only place we accessed data was via guest account access. I do know for certain that advising had not received all of the transfer credit information prior to his orientation/advising session, but that obviously was a YMMV situation. It didn’t seem clear to me that “pre-senior ones are already showing up” meant they were visible on the VT side or if it was in reference to the HS transcript. I think you might have misinterpreted my question, or maybe I didn’t communicate it clearly.
