<p>In the big book of forms, it appears that room assignments don't come out until July 12. However, D says that she has seen that some Obies already have their info. I looked on Presto but didn't see anything. In fact, I wasn't even sure what heading it would fall under. Anybody have any updates on this? D will be a freshman.</p>
<p>It’s not in Presto. She needs to log in to the ResEd website. Hint: there’s a lot of discussion of this on the Oberlin 2014 Facebook group.</p>
<p>The OSCA lottery was on Tuesday, and they started making assignments for program houses and the first-year dorms on Thursday… but they’ve still got a long way to go. So if there’s nothing posted for your D on the ResEd site, don’t sweat it yet, especially if she requested a traditional dorm as her first or second choice.</p>
<p>She requested a program house - German. I’ll go on Resed and look. She told me PResto.</p>
<p>I just talked to resed and they said very few first years have their assignments but that it will be on PRESTO under addresses once it is assigned. After everybody has received their assignment, they send you an email. So bottomline, it should be on PRESTO first.</p>
<p>I really respect my D’s college, but some things they do don’t make sense. If they can drive traffic to PRESTO to learn their room assignments, why all the drama with emails to everybody all at once, after the fact? They also get some things wrong, like ages. When my D saw her room assignment on PRESTO last summer, it had the name of her roommate and her roommate’s age (don’t ask me why they include that particular detail–this is something else that doesn’t make sense, not to mention feels like a privacy violation). It turns out they had my D’s roommate’s age off by two full years. No, her roommate didn’t lie. Her roommate’s mother told us her age on move-in day. It differed by two years from what Resed listed on PRESTO.</p>
<p>HA. So after all this, the dorm assignment came up on oberlin resed site, not PRESTO. Why would they tell me PRESTO?? I guess they laughed after I hung up. They probably get a million calls.</p>
<p>As much as I love Oberlin, the administration really needs to re-work their orientation packets. I have never seen anything so confusing as what we encountered last year when my daughter was a freshman – from dorm placement to mailing individual documents all over campus. It was really ludicrous.</p>
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<p>LOL! Not just mailing, but emailing with attachments, faxing and shipping. We did all four, to satisfy the demands in The Big Book of Forms. All I can say is that’s Oberlin. I also thought the “Accepted Students” day last year was chaotic, at least in comparison to our experience at other LACs and even a flagship public. German-like precision is not one of the college’s qualities. Fortunately, Oberlin has other extremely wonderful qualities. My daughter loves Oberlin. And my wife and I think it is the perfect school for our daughter. I just wish it wasn’t so far away and was a lot cheaper. :)</p>
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<p>Amen to that.</p>
<p>The latest idea, to post tuition bills and statements to Presto, goes to the other extreme, and to me is equally problematic: how many times will I have to remind my student to forward the Presto statement? Presto is also a very cumbersome and outdated system, hard to navigate (you can’t backspace, for example, and some of the various categories of items are named confusingly). If the student is paying the bills, that’s one thing. But if they are not, why can’t Oberlin have students simply waive their privacy rights to these bills and have Oberlin send them directly to parents - by email if that’s the way they prefer, or by regular mail.
I hope some of the administrators who read these posts will pass this on.</p>
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<p>So true. It’s not like 98% of students have any use for the bill. It’s only going to come to us parents anyway.</p>
<p>And, in any event, many other schools have no trouble at all sending the bill directly to the parents.</p>
<p>We did receive a paper bill in the mail this year about one week after the statement appeared on my daughter’s Presto account. As parents do not have access to Presto, students need to be diligent and forward the bill if parents are financially responsible for payment. At my older daughter’s college, students can give their parents a password to view financial accounts and we receive an email notifying us that statements have been posted. This system works well. Perhaps Oberlin may want to try this?</p>
<p>Hmmm . . . what we’ve done is make an agreement with our student that we do get to have access to PRESTO, because we need it to access financial information. It’s just too much anxiety for me to not have access to the financial records: what we owe, has the financial aid hit the system, whether checks have been received, etc.</p>
<p>I understand - from our first child - that this type of arrangement may not work smoothly with all students :-)</p>
<p>That said, I like the e-mail approach studiomom suggests.</p>
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<p>Speak for yourself. :)</p>
<p>OK, I admit I am the type to give my daughter her privacy so I simply ask her to forward me the financial statements. Of course, as parents we all handle this differently!</p>
<p>^
It’s not necessarily the parents. Some kids WANT their parents to have access. In fact, some kids INSIST because they have an open, very trusting relationship with the humans they affectionately call “parental units.” </p>
<p>I’m not saying I have access. I’m just sayin’… it brings tears to my eyes to know the level to which this parental unit is trusted. :)</p>