I have read online that the housing opens on October 3rd at noon, however, in the University of Alabama’s Out Of State Student Guide 2017-2018, it has October 1st as the day that housing opens. Would anyone be able to clarify which date it is? Thanks for any feedback, I just want to get the earliest time slot possible when it comes to choosing my room. Thanks, and Roll Tide!
Oct 3 at noon Central.
Some quick tips for anyone wanting to apply for housing quickly:
- Make sure you paid your freshman enrollment deposit at least 2 hours prior. It can take 2 hours for that information to be updated in your myBama account so that the housing software can see it.
- If the student is under the age of 19, both the student and a legal guardian/parent will need to sign the contract. As pretty easy - the student signs the version inside the application, and the parent gets a copy emailed to them to review and sign.
- If your Honors College status isn’t updated when you apply for housing, that’s fine. You can complete the application now and then your Honors status will automatically be updated later once Honors College finalizes decisions.
- If you do not see Academic Year 2017-2018 as an option in the terms to select, it most likely means that your freshman enrollment deposit has not been processed. Please do not apply for Spring Only 2017 housing instead!
Hope this helps,
Janine
Hello and help – we are stuck in Step 6 and can’t move forward, but everything is done! We want to pay our deposit!
@UAHousing, and by “we”, @beachham means a good number of us—something’s broken on the site, and it isn’t affecting everyone (some have been successful), but for the rest of us, we’re in a “Take our money, please!” moment, but we can’t send it in!
So it finally worked—but it was way more stressful than it should have been.
One final glitch, for the benefit of @UAHousing in the hope that it gets seen by someone who can fix it, was that after paying the deposit it said I had to click “save & continue” to proceed—but there was no “save & continue” button. Instead, I had to click on the next step in the timeline and finalize the application there.
So my daughter’s in the system and everything—but for the benefit of future years, the whole fraught process needs to be fixed, both in terms of adding server capacity (if that’s what the problem was) and correcting errors in the user interface.
@dfbdfb – PLEASE share how you got it to work? Totally stressing out here…
@beachham, I just kept trying. I’m convinced that it’s an issue either with UA’s servers being overloaded (though everything was responsive enough that I don’t think it’s that) or the connection to DocuSign not being robust enough.
Once you do get the document up, though, a bit of a potential speed bump where it’s slightly counterintuitive—the student has to initial and sign the document that comes up on the housing application site, and then the parent gets emailed a link to click through where they initial and sign it, and after that the deposit can be paid and so on.
After you sign the document through email (parent step), you have to log out of the housing app and then log back in and it will take you to the deposit step. As dfbdfb stated, there is no save an continue button…just click on step 7 in the timeline and you can move forward.
Thanks, @dfbdfb – have had signed PDF completed for a while now – must be the DocuSign connection that’s not receiving the signed PDF – I can’t move to step 7 – it’s an empty button. I’ll keep trying – but I’m freaking out, quite frankly. UGH!
Yeah—a step-by-step “here’s how to do it” (with screenshots!) provided ahead of time by UA Housing would have been greatly appreciated.
Here’s the step-by-step guide for those who haven’t gone through it yet: https://housing.sa.ua.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/31/Housing-Application-Guide-2017.pdf
I’m sorry, friends, I was travelling all day and didn’t’ see these until now. If you are still experiencing issues, please call the main Housing office at (205) 348-6676 and someone will assist you.
Hope this helps,
Janine
@UAHousing, an email reply (very polite, so hurrah! for y’all’s staff there) told me the problem was that the system is limited to 1,000 documents per hour. Given the demand, that might oughtta be upped by a bit for a few hours next year, I’m thinking…
From what I’m being told by our IT people, the limit was actually not on our software, but on the DocuSign that we implemented for signing the contract for the first time this fall. So, yes, a bit of a learning curve for all of us on adding that process in. We definitely want to make the process as efficient as we can, so we will most certainly use it as an opportunity for improvement!
Janine
Did we miss something?? Finished the whole process -paid the registration fee, the dorm fee, filled out the personality preferences, etc. but never did see a page where she could actually put down a dorm preference like Ridgecrest, Lakeside, etc.
We did realize she had not yet finished her Honors College application so maybe that was the holdup?
Carachel, no, your student will be able to select from any spaces she’s eligible for when she does online room selection, as long as she completes by Feb. 1. After that, we will be assigning students to available space that she’s eligible for. If you’d like for me to double check if your application is complete, please PM your student’s full name.
Hope this helps,
Janine
@UAHousing …we applied and paid our deposit and housing deposit back in October however I thought he had to wait until Feb 1st to pick up room…is that not correct?
Room selection doesn’t begin until early May. Look here: https://housing.sa.ua.edu/incoming-residents/freshman-faqs/
@beth’s mom…thank you. I just wanted to make sure we didn’t miss something.