Let me preface this by saying that I have no older siblings that live anywhere near me and that I am the child of a single parent who has never been involved in my high school life or my college admissions processes, so I went into this rather blind. Even so, I am kicking myself for what I feel like is a careless mistake that may have jeopardized my future.
I am a current senior in high school and I applied to two different colleges in my state: University of Florida and Florida State University. UF is my first choice. I went through all of the application processes for both schools, including creating my SSAR, answering questions on my extracurriculars, self-reporting/sending test scores, and submitting my essays. I also submitted my FAFSA before the deadline for both schools (about a month ago); I created a FSA ID for myself and my mother (with her permission and with her information) and I am confident I signed my FAFSA with both accounts before submitting it. Upon finishing, I received a message stating my FAFSA was successfully submitted to financial student aid.
However, among the clutter e-mails in my inbox, I located a message from Federal Student Aid from December 4 saying my FAFSA had issues and that it needed to be fixed. I logged back onto the FAFSA website and was horrified to discover that it said my application was incomplete and needed parent signatures. This was today, eleven days after the deadline for the FAFSA for UF (FSU had a December 1 “priority” deadline but is still encouraging people to finish it). I signed it for what I believe to be the second time using my mother’s FSA ID and submitted it again and it says it is processing.
When I go under my FAFSA’s “Correction History” section, it says my original application was received on December 1 and processed on December 4, (before UF’s deadline), but that it was missing signatures–the status, verbatim, is “Processed - Missing Signatures”. Upon reviewing that submission, everything appears to be filled out completely and correctly. It says it was “corrected” today, when I frantically (re) signed it. I am unsure that the colleges I included on the form ever got the original submission and I am wondering if anyone has heard of a similar situation in which the FAFSA had to be corrected after an initial submission and after a college’s deadline since both colleges won’t be open for some time.
In my opinion, this is literally the worst possible time for this to happen because thanks to the holidays and school closings, I will have to wait for an entire week before finding out how destructive, exactly, this mistake is. I am not so much worried that UF/FSU won’t accept me as a result of this error (should I be?) as I am that I am not going to be able to get financial aid. My family is poor and we struggle to keep our heads above water even with me attending a totally-free one-mile-away public school, and without financial aid, affording college is going to be extremely difficult without going into a ton of debt. Please excuse the length of this post.