<p>Hey so I'm a first year and about to start my second semester, and since I'm out of state I received work study as part of my financial aid offer. The problem is, I haven't been able to get it. I went to cavlink and applied to jobs that I thought I could do, and I applied to almost 10 of them but no one responded. I then gave feedback on their website saying that why isn't anyone saying anything? And then I got a response saying that you're only contacted if you're selected for the job. </p>
<p>Does anyone know if its always this hard to get a job? Or is it just me. Is there something more I should do, or some particular opportunity I should look out for? Because I'm starting to get confused, it can't be that they have a shortage of jobs or anything I'm pretty sure so why would they make it seem as though there are none.</p>
<pre><code> I would really appreciate if someone could help me with this, especially a current student or alumni. My parents are kind of getting mad at me for not doing a job there when I was supposed to and I am not sure why I'm failing to get one.
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<p>I would go in person to the financial aid office and have them help you apply for appropriate jobs. Some jobs are more popular than others. I had friends who worked in the dining hall, library, as TAs, etc. Many jobs are taken up by upperclassmen so your options might be limited this year. Please go in person so they can help set you up with an appropriate job for this year.</p>
<p>Oh ok. Yeah I thought I’d go to Hersey Frances for help with my resume and ask her about getting jobs, but the thing is, even if they help me, they’ll probably look at the same place where I looked for them right? And unfortunately it seems a lot of those work study jobs are limited in number, and even more so by their specific requirements. I was just hoping to get any simple job like cleaning, helping out or anything but I can’t really find those types on cavlink.</p>
<pre><code> But yeah, I’ll go to them and ask them because I really need something to do and I have to pay for expenses somehow, and they might know about opportunities I don’t know about, so let’s see how that works. If I do get a job, I’ll come back on this thread and tell you so that other people who read this are informed too.
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<p>I’d try to move on this as soon as possible - I understand work study cannot be used over the summer.</p>
<p>I imagine someone in the financial aid office knows which jobs are easier to get, or can put you in touch with someone who can help. There should be sufficient numbers of jobs, because the individual UVa departments do not have to pay for work study out of their regular budget.</p>
<p>As an aside, this is certainly an area where I think many schools (not limited to UVa) have a serious shortcoming. The school is using Work Study to fulfill their own paper obligation to “offering aid” and yet falling short in fulfilling their obligation to the student/family because: A. they allocate more “aid $” to Work Study than most students can realistically earn while in school, and B. they don’t ensure that employment is available. It is a bit of a broken promise to tell a student “We’re providing you with 100% of your need, but we’ve reduced grant money by $4000 because we expect you to earn $4000 in Work Study (even though that would require a heavy 25 hrs/wk of work during school) - and, BTW, we also can’t guarantee you will find WS employment.” As for UVa in particular, our S was offered WS at all schools he was accepted to. In each case, the amount he was expected to earn never exceeded $2400 - except at UVa which was/is $4000. For budgeting purposes, we’ve kept that at $2400 for him at UVa as well (which he can manage) and have had to try to come up with the missing $1600 some other way. The system definitely leaves room for improvement.</p>
<p>charlieschm yeah that is what I’m going to try to do as soon as I get back and I hope it works out well for me</p>
<p>grp2013 that is so true! $4000 is a lot of money and they shouldn’t just allocate 4k for WS when they know it’s not that easily obtainable. But yeah I’m gonna try to do what I can and at least earn something</p>
<p>I believe research can also be done as WS, although you may not find those opportunities as a 1st year. But if you are interested in research that a professor is working on, it might be worth asking as well - because as charlie pointed out, there is a financial benefit for the department using students on WS.</p>