MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — West Virginia University freshman move-in for the fall 2026 semester begins Thursday and runs through Saturday.
WVU Vice President for Student Life Gary Furbee said move-in schedules have been drafted and they are ready to welcome a new class to the Morgantown campus.
“This is the calm before the real flurry starts,” Furbee said Monday on WAJR’s “Talk of the Town.” “Yes, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday the bulk of our students will all be moving in.”
The process used this week was rolled out during the pandemic to allow people to move in and observe social distancing rules at the time. The process also spreads the congestion out over time to help the process move smoother and helps student volunteers be more effective.
“We’ve kept that and the logistics behind it,” Furbee said. “It gets updated year to year but for the most part it is no longer that one day of real madness we used to see in town.”
Some students, athletes, and grad students have already made the move and are getting reacquainted with Morgantown. Furbee said by the end of this week the Morgantown campus will be bustling with thousands of students once again.
“We’ve had move-in actually with our upper-class students in August,” Furbee said. “By now we have a lot of student athletes on campus; our band is on campus, and certainly by the end of the week they’ll be here, and we’ll all know it in some way or another.”
When move-in starts Thursday morning, students are limited to one vehicle and are asked to pack belongings in small, easy-to-carry boxes or containers. By the end of the week, Furbee said the transformation of the city will be evident.
“We’ve certainly scheduled folks throughout the day, but I imagine there will be some early arrivers,” Furbee said. “If you’re at work by 9 a.m. you’ll see an increase in traffic from that point forward.”
Before Sunday Night Lights and the start of the refreshed Welcome Week, the students will have access to Midnight Mountaineer at the Student Rec Center Friday night, the first WVUp All Night of the year. Before classes on Tuesday the students will experience the Fall Fest replacement, the Mountaineer Midway and Movie, instead of live music as in the past.
“We give them a day or two to acclimate to the routine of living in a residence hall and having a roommate,” Furbee said. “We’re going to have a lot of activities to get them out of the rooms as much as we can as they learn campus and we start to indoctrinate them into the culture of WVU.”