Maximizing your financial aid, or Do your FAFSA!

Financial aid can be an important way to supplement your funding during graduate school.  In some rare cases, it can even cover the majority of costs associated with your education.  Though the total amount of available student aid has decreased in recent years, many aid options are still available, and financial aid should not be overlooked as a potential source of support.

Student aid may be available from:

1. The federal government (this post is U.S. centric, sorry international readers)
2. Your state government
3. Your university or college
4. Private sources such as non-profits

Federal student aid is usually the largest and most readily-available support, coming to students in the form of grants, loans, and work-study.  Grants are hands-down the best type of student aid because they do not need to be repaid.  Loans are just the opposite.  As I've stated the, the purpose of this blog is to help you avoid taking on any further debt, so I won't touch on loans here.  The final type of federal student aid is work-study, which essentially provides funds to employ the student at their university.  Work-study can be a little tricky, as the university is responsible for arranging the work opportunities and not all schools participate in the program.

The remaining types of aid (state, university, and private) vary widely from location to location.  The best way to find more information on what sources of support may be available to you is to visit your school's financial aid office.  This office is responsible for managing financial aid funds for all students, and they should be able to provide you with a great deal of information regarding funding opportunities.

A nearly-universal first step in applying for financial aid is to submit a Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).  This application provides information about yourself, your schooling, and your financial need to the federal government, allowing them to calculate how much aid you should receive. They do this by generating what is called an Expected Family Contribution (EFC), which is the amount of money you (and your family if your parents can still claim you as a dependent) are expected to provide for your education.  This value is weighed against the projected costs of your education, and used to determine how much money is required to make up the difference.  You can submit your FAFSA application here and in the mean time you can calculate a projection of how much aid you might receive using FAFSA4caster.

Once your FAFSA is received, the Federal Student Aid office will generate a student aid report for that year and forward it to your university.  The actual amount of funding you are given will be determined by your school.  Your FAFSA information will also be used to gauge your eligibility for other state, university, and private funding.  It is important to note that some independent scholarships, grants, and fellowships will require that you submit a FAFSA and may ask to see your student aid report or EFC.

There is a national deadline for completing a FAFSA (usually June 30th), but it is important to look up your state's deadline.  Student aid is often given starting on a certain date and disbursed until there aren't any funds left to give.  Thus, it is very important to have your FAFSA completed before your state's deadline.  After that point, they will begin to divy up the funding and your chances of receiving aid may be diminished.  Look up your state deadline here. 

A great deal more information can be found on the website of the Office of Federal Student Aid and on the main FAFSA page.  Also, I can't stress enough the importance of talking to someone in you university's financial aid office.  They will be best able to guide you through the specifics of obtaining financial aid in your state and at your school.

In summary, submitting a FAFSA is important.  Make sure you do it by your state's deadline.  If you miss the deadline, submit one anyway.


Best of luck,

Casey

The Sequester: What is it and what does it mean for you?

If you have been paying attention to the news lately, and likely even if you haven't, you are probably aware of the "fiscal cliff" and the ensuing "sequester" or "sequestration."  Despite its prominence in recent news stories, the sequester remains a mystery to a lot of people.  My goal in this post is to share some information about the sequester to help you understand what it is, and how it may affect you.

To that end, the obvious first question to answer is "What is the sequester?"  The sequester is a set of budget cuts and tax increases that were "intended to reduce the federal deficit by $1.2 trillion as required by the Budget Control Act of 2011" (Council of Graduate Schools, document here).  These cuts were drafted as a response to the deepening economic crisis that began in 2008 and had driven our government towards bankruptcy.  Interestingly, it can be argued that no one ever intended for the sequester to actually occur.  Rather, the sequestration was scheduled to come into effect automatically in January 2013, providing a deadline that would intimidate law makers into agreeing upon a federal budget.  This deadline is what was referred to in the media as the fiscal cliff.

Well, predictably, our law makers were not able to come to an agreement and we fell off the cliff.  The next logical question to ask is "what does that mean for us?"  I've outlined some details of the spending cuts below that are particularly applicable to graduate students and researchers:


U.S. Department of Education Higher Education Program: -$186 million

• Office of Federal Student Aid: -$254 million

U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science: -$400 million


National Institutes of Health: -$2.5 billion

• According to the Council of Graduate Schools "the NIH budget cuts due to sequestration can translate into approximately 2,400 fewer research project grants made to universities and institutes throughout the country."

National Science Foundation Research and Related Activities: -$469 million

• Education & Human Resources: -$76 million
• "The NSF would fund 1,600 fewer research and education grants which would be equivalent to approximately 19,300 fewer researchers, students, and technical support personnel than FY 12"  (Council of Graduate Schools)

Clearly, these cuts are substantial and are not to be ignored.  It is likely that they will have far-reaching and long-lasting impacts on federal funding for research activities (and for federally funded programs across the nation). In the words of Marc Kastner, Dean of the School of Sciences at MIT, "The sequester wreaks its havoc by striking the hardest at particular points in the life cycle of a university researcher...Cuts in budget strike those dependent on other people's grants -- graduate students, post docs and soft-money research scientists."

Underlying this entire discussion is a conflict that has been developing in this country for many years: the trend toward broad-scale defunding of basic science in favor of applied or industry related science (what AAAS CEO Alan Leshner refers to as "quick-turnaround, low-risk" science).  Many law makers have been calling for the federal government to stop funding basic science altogether.  Probably not the best example, but remember Sarah Palin loudly and publicly decrying the use of federal funds to study fruit flies?  I'm not going to touch the politics of Sara Palin with a 10-foot (3m) pole, but this particular example is only one of many that has been voiced in recent years.

The real kicker here is that basic science is incredibly important.  I know I'm preaching to the choir, but I will again quote Marc Kastner in saying that "paying for basic research is a bet a society makes on its future...(for example) it's estimated that the Human Genome Project delivered a return on investment of 141:1 -- $141 in wealth created for every dollar spent on the job."  Some experts believe that not investing in basic science can have devastating economic effects.  The non-partisan Information Technology & Innovation Foundation released a report estimating that the cuts to basic research found in the sequester would reduce the GDP of the U.S. by $200 billion over a nine year period.

So, that brings us to our final section: "How is the sequester affecting us right now, and when is it going to end?"  There is no denying that we are already feeling the effects of these budget cuts.  I personally know of at least one person who lost their PhD funding, as it was coming from a project that was cut due to sequestration.  The EPA still has not announced the recipients of this years STAR fellowships, and the outlook is getting grimmer by the day.  In the words of EPA STAR technical contact, Brandon Jones:

"Yes, the Sequester has put quite a damper on things, including award announcements.  No award decisions have been made and right now we do not have a timeline for those decisions."

Like the EPA, many federal funding agencies are unable to say one way or another how many awards they will be giving in the coming years, or even whether they will be able to continue funding grants and scholarships at all.  One major reason for this is that no one knows how long sequestration will be in effect.  The sequester ends when law makers pass a federal budget, but due to the seemingly universal inability of our law makers to find compromise with one another, it remains unclear when this will happen.  The timing, and more importantly the content, of the new budget will play a large role in determining how federal funding for graduate students will be affected in the coming years.  For example, Obama's most recent budget includes some fairly major changes to federally funded graduate fellowships (though it seems very unlikely to me that this budget will be accepted by law makers).  Check out the details here.

To make this very long story short, no one really knows exactly how the sequester will affect graduate students or when it will end.  In the short term, it's not looking great, but we won't know the long-term outlook until a new budget is passed.

In the mean time keep your chins up and struggle on!

Casey

The Objective

I have started this blog with the intention of creating a resource for graduate students seeking to fund their education and research. As the content develops, I hope to provide valuable information regarding where to find scholarships and grants, tips for writing fundable applications, advice on marketing yourself to funding agencies, and information on what to do with the money once you have received it.

All of my information on this subject comes from reading, research, conversations, and from my own personal experiences. My field is biological science, so my information will almost inevitably be slanted towards this particular field, but I think that much of what I have to say is broadly applicable to a variety of disciplines. I am not a professional grant writer, but I have been successful in securing funding in the past. Now I hope to share the results of this experience with others, so please stay tuned for future developments.

 More soon,

 Casey