Does anyone know anything about appealing your merit award and financial aid at GW? Any tips?
It never hurts to try, but I highly doubt they will change their mind. In my experience financial aid is kind of hard to deal with - either the people who work there don’t have a standardized way of doing things or they don’t get back to you consistently. Sometimes the person is great, other times they’re really unforgiving. I can pretty much guarantee they won’t budge on merit scholarships but you might be able to make a case for financial aid. Definitely call, don’t email just so they can be held accountable. But, one thing that did happen to me: in addition to my scholarship and work study I have the university and alumni grant. Between freshman and sophomore year it went up about $8000. I have no idea why and there was no explanation, so I just took it without asking any questions. My only guess is that maybe if you do well your first year they reward you with a higher grant, but I don’t know that for sure at all. The same thing happend to my friend, but neither of our financial situations changed between freshman and sophomore year. But in any case, my suggestion is to call to appeal the financial aid aspect in a conversation. You can try the merit scholarship too, but to me that just seems so unlikely. Good luck!
@abbygwu I was at Inside GW this weekend and I spoke to the financial aid office. They said they never change merit awards. They also told me that the appeals are done through a sort of committee of financial aid counselors, so hopefully that will account for the fact that some of them are better than others. I submitted my appeal through the traditional route - do people actually “negotiate”/appeal through a phone call? That seems so unlikely. Thank you so much for your help.