What is the situation at Brown University for financial aid. I was admitted under ED and they have given me an estimate of how much money they’d be willing to offer me. I am glad that it appears to be very high. However, is this a solid estimate?
Also, what other scholarships could I apply to?
Yes, it should be a good estimate. What it really depends on is whether or not your parents’ financial situations have changed between last year and this year.
There aren’t any other Brown-specific scholarships that you can apply to at this point, as far as I know. You can certainly apply to outside scholarships.
If you get outside scholarships won’t that change your EFC such that it ends up sort of being a wash? I thought I’ve read that before.
@iwannabe_Brown, outside financial scholarships are supposed to first be put towards your summer contribution, loans, and work study (if applicable). Anything higher than that reduces your university scholarship; you can’t put it towards the amount your parents are expected to pay (of course, you can always not report scholarships so as to not reduce your FA, but that’s risky and I don’t endorse it).
Check with your high school’s guidance department. Many schools offer scholarships from local organizations soecifically for their graduates. Some of these can be very generous. However, you won’t learn about whether you received these until graduation.
Hey guys! Thanks a lot. I appreciate the replies! So, if I get enough money from scholarships, I may not need to do work study? I don’t mind being in debt… It’s about the learning. Of course, I say that to some extent. I actually spent a summer at Brown while also working at McDonalds. I’d honestly rather not work. It’s not that work wasn’t fun. It’s just that I’d rather be using my time for something else.
Does anyone know of any scholarships that I can apply to online? It’s quite difficult for me to find any… Maybe more will appear after the new year. Does anyone know how work study works?
So basically you don’t HAVE to do work study even if it’s in your FA package. Let’s say it says $1500/semester work study: that $1500 will be billed to your account no matter what. They don’t know (or care) if it came from a job or not; they just want the money. Everything you earn from an on-campus job goes to you. Whether you use it to pay your bill or to buy Chipotle every day is your choice.
There are a lot of scholarship search engines out there. If you Google that, you should be able to find quite a few. But your best bet really is more local scholarships, just because the competition is greatly reduced.
As far as financial aid estimates, it is garbage in/garbage out. If you gave accurate estimates of 2015 income then it will be unchanged. If your FAFSA changes your income figures then it will change your estimate accordingly. You might consider contacting @CourtneyThurston for a list of outside scholarships, she does it for a low low price. Google will find her website. You are late for many but some may be available.
My daughter held many work/study jobs at Brown that were valuable experiences and put a little spending money in her pocket. W/S are usually on campus and 10 or 12 hours a week. That really isn’t a burden, there is plenty of time to do other stuff, plus there are large studies that show that students who worked low hour work/study were better at time management and got better grades. Here are some paid jobs she held: recruit human subjects and run study tests for cognitive science research, crunch numbers for a physics research team (got a trip to the Fermi Lab with the team out of that), assistant in Brain Science Institute, phone alumni for donations, teaching assistant in Computer Science department, researcher in computer science dept.
On of the Brown grads who posts here always held a BUDS (Brown Dining Services) job and loved it. My dd’s friend help a library job the entire time and it allowed studying during evening hours. He held on tight to that one.
Honestly those jobs sound fantastic! I hope I get a scholarship, but now I want to work even if it pays for work-study. Isn’t work study great for the resume anyways?
I worked for BuDS for 6/8 semesters (one of those I was abroad) and loved it. Great way to make friends freshman year, especially people of different class years, and the work’s not that difficult. If you work for a semester or two and do well, you can apply to be a supervisor, which is a good perk for the resume and pays better.
I mean I don’t know how great for the resume being the checkout person at the library is, but my friends still enjoyed it because it was very little actual work so you were mostly just getting paid to do homework at the library.
This might be semantics (or I might be mistaken about work-study), but several of these I wouldn’t consider to be “work-study jobs” as they were open to anyone on campus (and honestly some of them would have been open to people outside of campus) and required certain skills/qualifications. I would consider work-study jobs to be jobs that any high schooler could be expected to do and preferentially given to financial aid recipients.
I don’t think any jobs on campus are given preferentially to FA recipients, but I’d consider “work-study” jobs to be any that have no experience necessary. Dining services, alumni center, library work, and administrative jobs are generally the main ones in that category.
^yeah, I wasn’t sure if that’s the case at Brown. My friends who are Princeton alumni I believe said that there are certain jobs on campus that are preferentially given to FA recipients. Work study plays a bigger role there though since there are no loans.