Can I Sign North Carolina Assignment of Partnership Interest

Document type sign assignment of partnership interest north carolina myself

thank you um as tiffany said this presentation is uh titled what to expect in assignments a guide to all things assignments and your future in it um hopefully most of you know us from being around seahorse for quite some time but um we're slowly katrina's been the assignments guru for a long time then i'm i'm trying to catch up um so let her introduce herself and then i'll follow uh i don't know about guru but uh so my name is katrina pavlock i am director of administration and occupancy management at nc state university i've been here for three years under me is assignments conference and guest services marketing technology i have been doing assignments in some way shape or form for more than 25 years now so and my start in assignments was at a very small private school where you wear many hats and it was one of the other duties as assigned um and that's when i sort of started my love for assignments and sort of started me down the path i guess all right my name is aubry adams i'm the associate director for occupancy management at louisiana state university i've been there in august it'll be five years but like katrina from the very beginning i have been in doing something in assignments even as an ra i worked in this office over the summer working through freshman assignments and getting the mailings out and things like that and then also transition to a small school where i wore multiple hats and physically inputted every single uh student assignment um so i've been at uh in assignments one way or another since 2003 um and then professionally since 2005. but we're very excited to talk to you about assignments some tips and tricks some things that some of you are probably in in-hall professionals or maybe mid-level looking to see either some tips for us to help you understand assignments but maybe if you want to transition to this side of of the department as well yeah and please feel free to drop questions in the chat so we will make sure that we have time at the end to make sure that we get to any of those questions that you do have so drop them right there in the chat we'll make sure we get to as many as we can we're sure um and most of those will probably save to the end but if we see something that's very good for the slide of course we'll try to jump in um but i want to talk to you a little bit about understanding assignments um as the subtitle reads it's more than just heads and beds i know that that's the bottom line we're trying to fill our beds because beds means revenue and that helps our budgets um but it's more than just that as young professionals we often get bogged down with handling the seemingly never-ending responsibilities found in an in-hall role in housing however it is essential that we make time to understand how the entire department works from facilities and marketing communications and i t to assignments and by taking a holistic approach you actually better your professional development and so i'm glad all of you visited with us today to learn a little bit more and maybe trying to figure out how you can be a little bit more pivotal in your current role and maybe your future and housing and residence life so um timeline management is one of the most key pieces um it's if you're a strategic thinker this comes very easily a lot of times but it's really interesting when i have conversations with our young professionals our grad assistants our rlc's at lsu or anywhere i've been to to make them understand we're not just looking at this year we're not just looking at last year and we're definitely not only looking at next year we're looking at at a minimum three years at any one time and you're looking at at a calendar um which can be difficult especially in times like this and i'm not going to belabor our presentation with all things covered because i think we we have enough of it but you know it's really difficult to experience things like this where you you want that apples to apples comparison but oftentimes you're getting an apples to orange comparison when you're comparing your data from year to year when we're going through a pandemic or some sort of enrollment crisis or something but managing multiple timelines and calendars is key you have not only your departmental timelines but you also have part campus partners the university calendar their academic calendar for classes you also have your enrollment management calendar all the marketing calendars any other partners that you have on campus financial aid um or any other processes that you have like if you have residential colleges or first year requirements for living on campus there's different processes that impact your timeline so it's very important to understand that at minimum you're looking at three years but you're also looking at as many as 10 to 15 other calendars that you're trying to make sure that you have accounted in your calendar it is one big one for us that we really have to make sure that everything we do um coincides with what they need from us so it looks good in our online system so that's one of the big in our department examples that we use as well as the res ed calendar you know there's things that we need to do daily that they do on a daily basis as well that we impact each other so room changes you know anything that you might do on a daily basis you might not think has anything to do with assignments it actually does so thinking about not only your partner timelines but the multi-year impact of all of those timelines coming together um aubry i will add i want to add one thing about the timeline um it is related to covid but because you know in assignments we're trying to plan for the fall and when i started asking questions like i was the only person that seemed like we wanted to talk about the fall because no one really wanted to start thinking that far ahead and we had to for an assignment standpoint um so it sometimes does mean in a situation like this that you're trying to you're trying to plan and in this current situation not everyone's really ready to start thinking that way so that forced me from an assignment standpoint to to do multiple plans you know normal occupancy not normal occupancy starting on time not starting on time so i had multiple plans so depending on what path we move forward i already had something in place to go forward so sometimes you do have to think um multiple paths when you can't get the answers that you're looking for definitely so normally i'm building my calendar for the next couple years every summer when i have a break if there ever is one um but i'm normally looking at that like throughout the year but so many roadblocks is saying just wait just wait and like katrina said you have to just start coming up with multiple options so that you can pick one up dust it off and tweak it a little bit probably but you can still run pretty quickly with it um so it's very important thanks for adding that um so strategies for success with your timeline management are like i mentioned a bunch of partner timelines having partnerships with your department is key you have to know that the key people that you need to speak to um for me like i said it's communications and marketing it's it and it's our res ed crew and our facilities crew so all of us are kind of like we can get siloed in our own areas within our department but there's several times when we intentionally come together to make sure that our calendars align so that everything makes sense and a lot of times as an assignment professional for me it's putting something in the system um so like a room change period or something like that if i know i can tweak it a little bit to make the in-hall staff have a better experience and not feel stressed out or bogged down with all kinds of craziness on top of all their student care aspects of their job i do whatever i can to tweak because ultimately that's only strengthening my relationship with the res ed side of our department um partnerships within your institution the largest one has to be enrollment management your admissions team because they're the ones that are giving you the heads to put in your beds right so whether you have a on campus live on requirement or not they still are the ones that are going to tell you what your their numbers are so that you can start planning how many beds you need to designate for your freshman or how many you can hold for your upper class i know katrina has a very complicated way of having to look at that because of their freshman enrollment and trying to figure out how many upperclassmen she can as spaces she can have for what we call contract renewal which most of you probably do that on your campuses um but it's very key for us to have a good relationship or at least you know very open communication relationship with enrollment management this year and last it has been for us with enrollment management a lot of just bending it until we almost break to help them because of a lack of communication on their part because of other priorities this year they're trying to transition to a test optional so that was their drive it wasn't the housing requirement so we're noticing that we're having to kind of flex to what they need us to do to make sure that we're pushing you know those enrollment deposits that are coming in to you know verify that these students are actually they're if they're admitted but are they actually coming to the university um so enrollment management is key um if you have if you don't have an internal i.t department then of course your university id department is definitely another key partner your university communications group if you don't have an internal department of that nature as well is very important financial aid for me is huge um because they can if a student's telling me i can't live on campus because i can't afford it my relationship with the folks in financial aid i can just email them right away and they can say yeah actually they're getting these kind of scholarships or or they're what we call pelican promise which is basically their full ride students that just don't know it yet but they just haven't packaged the full loan or scholarship information for the student yet and lastly probably not the only disability services or your accommodations department is a big partner for me i handle all of the disability services medical accommodations including esa's and service animals and i have my go-to liaison and we we call each other all the time or email or do whatever we need to to make sure our students are are being accommodated reasonably through ada responsibilities and requirements from us but conducting regular meetings establishing that not only the annual process but the you know the daily to weekly monthly just rapport with those individuals is very important and then tools for success are is usually utilizing your university supplied tools whether that's simply as the microsoft suite i know some of us probably got started just using excel there's no such thing as a housing software back in the day i remember we actually still have mainframe which is the black screen and green letters as our student information service system so um but we do have star as on our campus i know katrina also has star res i've used other options as well including banner thd from adirondack and seaboard so there's multiple options for software's out there but utilizing what your university supplies to you even though we have these robust software systems i know that katrina and i use excel every minute of the day almost so i mean at one point i might have 20 spreadsheets pulled up on my on my desktop or more sometimes depending on what i'm doing just trying to manage the data so making sure you understand your university supply of tools whether it is just your basic microsoft suite to your more robust softwares that they purchase off the shelf is very important so i mentioned what works for us excel is our go-to we both use star sometimes that works sometimes that doesn't but it just depends on your relationship again with your i.t department and your ability to actually interface with it getting trained on certain things and sometimes your i.t department wants to hold on ownership of the control and that's what i have at lsu and they're great but there's only so many of them and whereas katrina is almost she's a power user at nc state so she can do a lot more on her own than i can at lsu so making sure that we understand what's our what our expectations from the it partners at the institution and with the software company as well as with what we want to actually get done i'm i'm pushing slowly but surely in my fifth year to to get more control over report writing and different things like that um and as they are struggling to hire people because of higher freezes and things i think i'm making a little bit of leeway there okay so one of the next things we want to talk about from an assignment standpoint it's probably really not thought a lot a lot about when it comes to assignments but is key is is communications in the marketing part like what does your marketing team look like on your campus it might be you or you could actually have a team that you need to coordinate with so understanding from an assignment standpoint what that looks like who do you work with um who do you need to connect with or again is it you that needs to build that into your timeline to make sure that you are doing the marketing and communicating about assignments and assignment deadlines to your students you also really need to know what your audience is when it comes to thinking about assignments so do you have a list or are you sort of beating the bushes to try to get students to apply because your marketing strategy from an assignment standpoint is very different if you're really having to battle against off-campus partners or off-campus uh properties in order to get students to live on campus versus you always have a waiting list and then you're trying to manage that so understanding what your audience looks like and then how you market to them nc state normally doesn't have a waiting list but coveted really threw that out the window for us or did have a waiting list this year for our returning selection process we marketed like crazy because we didn't have the on-campus population to pull back from so we were really marketing hard for students uh to try to get them to come back into housing and why they wanted to come back into housing so how you approach that is going to be very different so understand what your audience looks like and how you want to market to them for housing then you've got to figure out how do you best reach your audience like what's the best way to reach not just your students but your parents and your campus partners to understand what your timelines are what your policies and procedures are and understanding what do your students pay attention to on your campus and you might have to do that in multiple different ways because email doesn't really always work anymore so you got to figure out what does your student population pay attention to and make sure that you're taking advantage of those opportunities to reach the students but also knowing that so many of our students their parents do so much for them so making sure that you're connecting and getting information to parents about timelines deadlines information about assignments is important and then obviously connecting with in strategic campus partners about your timelines for me that is athletics because they sort of guide their athletes through this process it's disability resources it's the international student office those are sort of some key ones that we make sure have our marketing and communication information to make sure that they can help us in sharing that out to students then you got to know do you have a budget for marketing or you know when you're building out your budget from an assignment standpoint understanding am i marketing or is there a team and where does that money live for budgeting to plan for marketing like do i need to add in a line do i need to make sure that it's incorporated in someone else's budget but making sure that you're thinking through the year in advance and do you have money set aside to do those various marketing campaigns that you might need to do uh to get information out about your assignment timelines and information you also then need to know what your your expectations are so what is your department's guidelines when it comes to marketing information and what's your your university's guideline so you got to be within your university's trademark and marketing guidelines and then i know nc state has some very specific departmental guidelines that we also follow um like we want to make sure that university housing is actually on all of our marketing information when we're sending it out so there's certain things that you know seem obvious but not always do people think about making sure that university housing is actually on things that they send out so making sure that you're aware of your guidelines and that you're incorporating those things into your marketing information to make it very clear especially to students that they know where it's coming from what it's about who's who to go to for questions and information so there's just a couple of things from a marketing and communication standpoint that you need to keep in mind and if i have learned nothing else through covid it is that there's not i don't think there's too much information that you can send to people right now because there's information overload but they also don't seem to be getting enough information so to make sure that you're sharing information and doing it in a concise clear way to folks but perhaps then linking it to a more detailed information so they get little nuggets but then take them to some place where they can get more it seems to be a strategy that is working for us a little bit but figure out what works for you because every campus is a little bit different with your approach so just figure out what works best for you on your campus so aubry if you're go ahead so one of the next things i want to talk about real quickly is data management and how you manage your data on your campus so if you're interested in assignments or you just want to understand how the assignments department works on your campus you really need to understand how your data is managed on your campus and i don't just mean your housing software you also need to understand how the information is managed on your campus as a whole and that is often referred to as your student information system or student information software or sis so if you hear that referred to that's what that means and that is typically some of the bigger ones are banner peoplesoft those are some of the bigger ones that i know i have used previously and those tends to be you know your major system records registration records you know housing can be in there so understanding how your campuses student information system works with your housing information system is important to understand so at a previous institution this banner was our student information system and that was the system of record so i had star res there but star res didn't do any billing or anything like that we fed back to banner and banner did the billing so that was a very different integration to banner because we had to make sure that the billing was accurate when it went back to banner to make sure that students were charged correctly so making sure that that feed was right making sure that the information was correct and that it went regularly to make sure that the information was there good here at nc state we do all that through star is we still feed information back to our student information system which is peoplesoft here but it is more for informational gathering from other departments than for billing or other things so understand how your systems work and what your school has is really important to moving forward and then obviously you got to know what housing software your department is using and how you can work with that how you can leverage it to help you uh to do your job um i think you know there's we're star as campus and i think we are just scratching the surface of really how star is can help us to do our jobs so we're trying to grow in that each and every day to make it work a little more for us um so understanding also um how your institution works with your housing system so is it a server based versus a cloud base so server based is it based on your campus so or is it cloud-based then is it served by the program that you're using those are very different to understand how they work because like if you come into work one morning and you can't get into your system which call do you make first is it a campus server issue is it a cloud issue so where you go to try to figure out what is going on so understanding sort of how your system works um and aubry alluded to this earlier who does your data management and she said earlier like i do a majority of our data management for star is like just about most everything falls under me like i i'm a power user on campus i do report writing but i also have an i.t person that does advanced report writing like he does sequel i don't want to know how to write sql but he does so if i need some more elaborate reporting i reach out to him our i t people work with me and help me with the billing process to make sure when we're talking about millions of dollars you want to make sure that it's set up and running accurately but just about everything else i have my hands in on a daily basis and do that where aubry works more with her id department on using her star red system so understanding how your data is managed and who controls that data on your campus are good questions to ask to understand how your system works for you and aubrey also alluded earlier to this on your day-to-day management of your information do you do that directly in whatever software you're using or do you use that in an excel or a word and for many years i used access to manage housing information so that was my go-to for a lot of years in how i used it and i remember the days of hand matching on postcards and things like that uh and there are times when i miss those days but uh so understand how you day-to-day manage so if you're interested in assignments ask your department how those things are done so you can better understand it even if you're really not interested in assignments it's in a career path but you just want to understand how that relates to the work you do those are great questions to ask so just keep those things in mind when you're wanting to know how data is working on your campus definitely um for me i'm going to add that when i'm working with my it department a lot of our conversations are okay i have these static reports what can i add to these reports or what other reports can we build to make my job easier so that's a lot of conversations i also figure out ways to pull a report that's already built and build something else on my own based off of other details that i might need and i also want to add on the server base versus cloud base a lot of times with your software companies that changes what they can offer you um so i know with us being a server based process with star res they don't give me the fun icons and things with the esa's because like cloud-based users if you a student has an esa or emotional support animal in their space there's a cool paw print that goes up next to their name but for me i have to do something a little bit differently to make sure that i'm notifying staff of an animal in the room whether that's adding it as an occupant or just keeping a outside shared drive list or both we do both right now so um but thinking in ways of what does my what does that server cloud-based structure offer me per my software something that i've learned in the last couple years since i've been with star is that there are differences and it's really important to understand those so aubrey there's a question in the chat about um internal housing i.t departments versus external so i don't have nc state does not have internal i.t department uh so but we have an i.t person that is dedicated to dedicated to housing but he's also dedicated to other things so it is oftentimes me competing with his time but i work with those folks to say here are my peak times like here's when i know i'm gonna need his help um so that's room selection the freshman assignment you know process um just so i know i'm gonna need him for some report writing those more complicated reports and things like that so and aubry you have internal i.t right right our internal i.t department they have several employees i only have two that solely do star as in database management and then which is a lot compared to a lot of people i know i'm gonna say only but then we also have a team that does our access interface as well as a couple other projects that they have with all of our managing all of our equipment and you know just inventory those types of things um so and of course we actually staff a student health run health debt help desk that anyone whether it's me needing help in my office to a student in a res hall space they can email reslifehelp lsu.edu and have someone contact them within that day to help troubleshoot their issue and that's of course managed by professional staff but it's pretty much all students we get people it doesn't matter what their major is as long as they have an interest in us and a talent and 19 they get to work in these positions which is really cool for us to to have that resource we are very blessed to have an internal i.t department our director of iss is fantastic she she ends up doing a lot actually for the whole campus because she knows so much about how all of the programs interface so we do have a great program it in april also asked about uh reports and so within depending on what software you have there's usually a shared report so you can have people write reports that are shared and then individuals can run those reports so that's another way of understanding your data management is do i have the ability to go run my own reports when i need them and it's just a matter of selecting the term or selecting the building so you can put parameters on them or do i need to reach out to someone else when i need a report to be able to run that for me so that's another important thing to understand about your department and and how your data is management managed and how you have access to that data you know here we try to write as many reports as we can that people can run as they need them so we write them and then we make them available for them they can't write their own but we write them share them and then they can run them as needed yeah we set up individual folders per area so that they know that's our folder we can go to and we have a regular conversation okay you just asked me for this report what can i do to make it so what reports do you really need for me to be able to have those readily available for you because it it only adds more i don't like to say more work to us but more content to our calendar and our timeline if we're having to pull away from a process to to build a report so i like to have a long conversations about you know what are some things that you need routinely um what do you need things because we can capital reports to drop into their actual desktops daily and by the minute if we needed to but i mean being a little ridiculous but we can have them schedule drop reports and that they don't even have to log into star s4 it can just go straight to their their files um so we work pretty much every year trying to make sure that we're keeping those reports updated making sure they're useful as well as adding any other information and of course with covid a lot of those detailed reports needed to be expanded upon or more were added just to make sure that that things were related to the staff of our resident team and our communication team asked for the most reports we also have we work with ryze which is our ppp program um and they also need information so we work with them to make sure we're dropping protected information to them whenever they need it in a scheduled basis so it's not again pulling us away from something we're trying to do to get them a report it's one of the big parts of being a good partner on campus is making sure that we can provide the information that they need in a timely basis um well i i have five people on my staff you know other departments don't have that many assignments people so and even though i have five our programs are so overlapping and and time consuming that it is hard to pull anybody off of certain projects sometimes so making sure if we're proactive we're able to meet those needs okay so for i know we have some seasoned people in in the room which i love but um we also have a bunch of new faces and i love even more um so we're going to really talk about how to leverage your current role um in either whether again whether it's you just want to learn a little bit more about assignments or to be honest if you're just tired of being on call and you want to have more of a nine to five and and let me not mislead you we're not just nine to five there's times during the year that our our work leads into our nightlife things like that um during covid i know katrina works still constantly but all summer i worked 16 hours a day just because there was a lot of doing work and then finding out something else undoing that work and redoing work in it and i think everybody did that no matter if you were in assignments or in the hall um whatever you you're constantly having to do those things so um but if you you're really interested in learning how to leverage your current role no matter what that is the first step is getting to know your assignments team and um the last couple years i'm not really sure why i understand this year because of the virtual nature of things but i haven't really gotten to know our res ed staff very well and it's really important especially for your directors assistant directors associate directors in res ed make sure you stress that your entry level staff gets to know the assignments team don't be afraid to walk down the hall or go to the next building wherever your team is located and meet those people um socially distanced for now but or you know even via email because we're emailing your teams like crazy every room change every esa approval um anything that we we do we typically we we send it to the rest coordinator the grad assistant in the building and their their assistant director so it's really important that they know who we are and that some emails that we're just trying to get data out and get on the information aren't us being rude or mean because we know how emails can come across but if they get to know us a little bit better they know how we operate and of course they can only get better professionally because they they know some of the folks in the main office um but getting to know us i think is very important and don't don't make it so it's a chore necessarily but make it so it's a need to do because it'll only make them better it'll only make them understand why we do what we do and ultimately we're the reason why they're in their buildings and have students to work with because we put them there um and and i don't like to make it sound so black and white but that's that's the start of it right but making sure that they know they should ask questions of us um and they they can we're no question is too small or large really we we look forward to actually interacting with the in-hall staff because for me i think i have five people and three of them all did in-hall work the other two were just kind of administrative assistants that worked up through the chain but um the three of us understand the trials and tribulations of on-call work student care doing all those things that really can make it so that 10 a.m deadline is going to be difficult to meet so challenging certain things and like i alluded to before making sure that you know that i can be flexible if it helps you do your job better in hall because you're the 24 7 contact i'm gonna try to do it as long as it doesn't break something in our in our cogs you know something that's gonna throw us off completely but usually wh n i like when i first started almost five years ago things have been done so long my predecessor had been there over 20 years that nobody was comfortable asking questions but i'm like i'm not that person let me know what's working what's not working and that way we've we've changed a lot of things to make it so the in-house staff doesn't feel stressed out about meeting certain administrative deadlines um because some as we know student care is such a priority that administrative strengths kind of get downplayed sometimes so making sure that you're working together with your teams is very important um so some strategies to find your place um volunteering is really key a lot of our in-house staff they end up not having anywhere to go for the summer or especially our grads or um rlcs that have year contracts that don't have uh in-hall students during the summer oftentimes we tap res-ed to see hey can we get extra help because our summers are our busiest times so volunteer for assignments opportunities facilities i.t but you know shameless club for assignments we can always use bodies and you're not going to learn anything that you can't translate somewhere else everything that you learn and working with us you'll be able to put to work somewhere it does and honestly it doesn't matter if you stay in housing residence life which you should or if you transition elsewhere because it's all data management it's communication and of course it's that administrative skill set that really a lot of people that i've noticed our new entry level positions um aren't very strong there again i think it's mainly because that's stress for student care and that in person exchange um but that's one of the things i work with our staff a lot about how how to really email communicate you know like there's a difference between just getting data out there and getting the information and having a conversation via email um so you know you just tell me so and so is wanting to move in one sentence isn't giving me anything that i actually need so when i'm dealing with nine thousand beds like katrina is then i'm gonna have a hard time really you know it's gonna take three more emails for me to exchange back and forth before i know what i really need to be doing for the student and then also sign up for a committee we have i'm sure every university has committees or task force or however you articulate the title of those work groups but um we have our operations committee we also have summer camps and conferences summer school there's different groups that we put together that any of our in-hall staff or you know seasoned mid-level and higher professionals actually work with facilities projects is a big deal especially our capital build projects get on those committees ask for that experience and it will take you a lot further in your career and we've already kind of talked about it but skills needed is learning excel i would just if you don't know it yet it's not as daunting as it might seem there's plenty of uh youtube videos out there there's still some things where i was like oh i forgot how to do that because i only do that thing once a year so i'll pull up a youtube video and go oh yeah that's how i do vlookup or that's how i do um copying data into another thing and every year i try to find something that i teach during our training for res life staff that um like i tell them okay you want to hear some magic tricks and i show them how to take a full name like last name comma first name and transition it as a first name and then last name in two different columns without having to type every single name um so that's there's a few they're like oh you're a wizard and i'm like no i just did some videos and figured it out and some of the things i just happened upon like oh all i have to do is type the first names and it drops down after two of them sweet and so it's just you know little things that i've learned using my microsoft word i use it a lot for mail merge we can do a lot in star res for automatic emails and things like that but when i'm working with my disability students for sure i use our mail merge and microsoft word just to make sure that i'm telling them where they are now what their accommodation is and um you know any other information that i have from disability services that's not super protected that i can email them out directly and not have to worry about blind copying and all that it's a direct email it's personalized and it's straight to them so they feel like they're they're not just one of those you know 600 students i'm working with in that process so those are the two main areas where i definitely look as far as technology is concerned um but also communication skills and those administrative skills if you think that you're lacking get with your assignments team because they will definitely help you learn a little bit more about being stronger in communication both verbally and via email awesome so one of the last things we want to talk about is some things that you really if you're thinking about assignments some things you need to know or questions you need to ask uh to move forward and one of the big ones is to know whether you're an auxiliary or not and what does that really mean um because that really hinges on how your department is funded and how your budget works for your department so what does that really mean is typically if you're an auxiliary you're self-funded so that means your rent paid from your residence covers everything and you typically don't get any money from the institution or from the state so that's why it really matters how many people are living on campus and how everyone plays a role in trying to make sure that students want to be on campus and want to be in your halls that we want to make it a great experience for them to live with us understanding how your budget is how your department is funded and how your budget on your department works is so important we recently did something for our staff that i i hope they found helpful uh where we broke down sort of our budget into like this is what a student pays in rent and here's what that money goes to and see this little bit of money left at the end that's the money y'all get to play with in the halls to do programming and other things so understanding sort of what student rent does and how that encompasses is probably a good thing to know because it helps you give you a better perspective on what every student in the hall means to the larger department it's important to understand your admission goals so do you have a live on requirement do you not have a live on requirement all right so understanding the goals for your admissions department and how they play into your department from an assignment standpoint with covid one of the things that changed for us was there were a lot of deferrals and now how does that play into assignments and the live on requirement at nc state so understanding that and how that impacts you so those are important relationships to have and important questions to ask and then like i said they live on or what expectations do you have for housing do you have a live on requirement is that a one year two year three year four year um what is your cancellation policies and it's important for everyone in the department to know these questions so you can answer these because you the last thing you want to do is give bad information to anybody and we all know that students will go to a website and they will just find the first person's name and call them and ask them all kinds of questions so it's important for you to know and be able to answer those questions about live on requirements cancellation requirements live on appeals all of those things and how they impact your department so you can answer those questions when they do come in and i know we got about five minutes left so i want to make sure that we go on to any questions there was a question in the chat about leveraging the roommate matching system for the actual assignment process and actually nc state we actually do use the roommate matching pieces for our freshman assignment process where we allow them to form roommate groups and they can use the matching process within stares we also have a set of matching questions so if they don't find a room roommate we use those matching questions to match and assign them as roommates using star as so because our freshman class is about 4 800 students there is no way i'm doing that by hand so i definitely leverage the auto assignment process through star rs for that katrina is nicer than we are we we'd use we have them use their own uh the star res matching system i call it match.com on stars um but we don't hand match anyone we don't look at profiles every once in a while i will if it's like a disability student i'll look at profiles just to know because i know this is a high need high-touch student but we tell them we advertise that we do not do any roommate matching outside of what's already available in the system and all of our freshmen and upper class unless we go to the wait list are self-assigned we don't assign them um so the weightless folks and then our disability students and our co-ed groups are the only ones that i actually get there get in there and manually assign um so it's very important to think about those things when you're doing any kind of roommate matching yeah because there's always all kinds of ways to use the systems for sure we didn't want to get into the business of well you put me with so and so we're like actually no you self-assigned on this date so it was you that picked the space in the room eight um so we we that was before i got there and i was very happy to continue that tradition so the the question about the our take on the ottawa sign versus you know you you picked it um i think you know sort of what aubry said is you know when they self-assign it's they picked it they did they chose it um but we've had a lot of success um with with our matching process um but here's the key to that for for me is i took many years of data of why students didn't get along as roommates so i tracked the room change process and why they didn't get along as roommates and those are the questions i use in our matching process and i don't ask a bunch of questions like it's it's the core group it's like four or five i think that's what i use so it's the basic living questions because the more you ask the more they think you're gonna find them a perfect match so there are pros and cons to both ways and it's just sort of a matter of figuring out what works best on your campus like i said i've had a lot of success but there's a lot of data behind the questions that i ask um using room change information and what what causes students to not get along start with but again all that goes out the window when mom or dad fill out the form for them so yeah we have i think we have multiple questions but when i if i'm going to go in there and use any questions to match it's like a core five like room temperature cleanliness guests those types of questions because i like katrina i've been in this long enough to know like what are the reasons why we handle room changes for for the majority of students and those are the t the key ones um during a political year i also look at those types of things too that's one of the extra questions that they throw in there but other than that that's the core lifestyle questions i think i saw how difficult is it to have an assignments budget when they budget for an auxiliary is determined on successive assignments i don't have a budget i know that's weird my budget is my personnel and my supervisor signs off on that so katrina has probably more to say about that than i do um yeah i mean my budget is um you have to think in normal in the normal land versus now because nc state closed housing not only in the spring but we closed housing in the fall so we have taken doing more with less to a whole new level through this pandemic so you you got to base your what you think your occupancy is going to be and you build your budget off of that and you never budget off 100 occupancy never never never i mean if you get their gold um but you typically do that off of a 95 93 occupancy so it's looking at your history and how your halls have been filled to knowing what your occupancy trends have been um and obviously a lot of that is going to change over the next couple years as we continue through this pandemic and recover from that so we have built out like a 75 occupancy and then to an 85 percent and then a 90 percent so we don't get back to our normal 95 occupancy for like three or four years out but understanding your occupancy percentage and then you build your budget off of that and give yourself a little grace in there as well i hope that helps budget director business operations director who he'll come in and say okay what do you think we're going to be at and for us we went from no live on requirement to a freshman live on requirement for two years and then covered so there's been very little ability to compare like i said those apples to apples comparisons um so i expect us to be 100 in the res halls with that first year requirement because i know our percentages for uh people who get exempt versus people who are required to live on is about 84 or 85 percent so i know that the halls are going to be filled but we never know what's going to happen with contract renewal especially this year because like katrina says we don't know who's going to continue to live with us or come back from being off campus because all their classes were online so yeah those are some things that are definitely good to think about i used to when i first got here we didn't have the first year requirement so our calls weren't filled and so i used to joke with my team okay every time you assign a new person you sold a car so let's let's keep going you get a star for the day every bed we sold it just kind of kept it light but it really wasn't it wasn't serious but it was kind of a fun thing to pretend we were doing