c/o Wes ResLife
The Office of Residential Life (ResLife) has implemented a cloud-based residential community management platform for housing registration and selection for the spring semester. The new software, called StarRez, replaces the application in WesPortal that was previously used for students to submit housing preferences. The change allows students to play a more active role in the housing process and reduces the burden placed on University offices.
“The new software gives students more agency and autonomy as students actually select their housing as opposed to the former system where students could only rank preferences,” Director of ResLife Maureen Isleib wrote in an email to The Argus. “In previous years, students returning from abroad in January submitted a preference form and our assignment coordinator placed them. Sometimes students received their preferences and sometimes they did not. Students really had no say after they submitted their preferences.”
The spring housing selection process—which only applies to students who were not on campus for the fall semester—consists of three processes: pull-in requests, applications, and general room selection. Pull-in requests allow any student remaining on campus in the spring with a vacancy in their unit to pull in another student; applications are required for program housing; and general room selection allows students to select rooms in all other open housing, including singles in dorms. Pull-in and application-based processes for next semester opened on Thursday, Nov. 9. ResLife sent out application-based housing offers by Thursday, Nov. 30, but pull-in requests are open until 12 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 8. General room selection will begin in late December.
The implementation of the system has resulted in a number of changes to the housing selection process. Because there are a limited number of fully vacant units, the general room selection process will shift from a group to individual process for the spring semester. Students will select units in dorms, apartments, and woodframes rather than forming groups. ResLife has encouraged students with vacancies in their unit to complete class-appropriate pull-ins and students who want to live with a particular person to apply as a pair to program houses. These changes will affect approximately 220 students returning from leave or study abroad in the spring.
Data Analytics & Integrations Manager at Information Technology Services (ITS), María Claudia Higuera Palacio, worked alongside ResLife to streamline the housing selection process and navigate the shift to StarRez.
“I have been heavily involved with the ResLife applications for years,” Higuera Palacio wrote in an email to The Argus. “There has always been some desire to move to an external provider for housing software since the Wesportal application is very complicated and requires a high amount of maintenance from ITS.”
The process of moving to a different vendor began in the summer of 2022 following broader platform shifts at the University, which was looking for more functionality and flexibility from its software. StarRez began to be implemented during the summer of 2023.
“StarRez is the leading residential life software in the market, their software is very stable, easy to use for both staff and students, and is very flexible to allow us to have program housing, community-based living, woodframes, apartments, and residential halls,” Higuera Palacio wrote. “We did demos with other companies and after evaluating those other products we decided StarRez was the best option for us.”
ITS and ResLife hope this shift will better accommodate the student population at the University, in addition to reducing the workload placed on the small WesPortal development team and on ITS, which supports many other campus applications.
Rose Chen can be reached at rchen@wesleyan.edu.
Anabel Goode can be reached at agoode@wesleyan.edu.