<p>I want to attend Pittsburgh but I am OOS and I only got the price down to around $25,000 per year. I am looking for any ways to bring this down to 20,000 a year or more so it is only within 5,000 of a state school. I am considering driving 8 hours to talk to their financial aid which they might respect since I would be driving so far just to attend Pitt. I would definitely try to be an RA. Is becoming an RA at Pitt easy/hard? Please explain. Are there scholarships easily available on campus; if you do well can you earn them? Thanks in advance for the help and if you know of any, and I mean any, ways to lower the cost of going to Pitt (Tuition, Room, Board) then please share. I am willing to try mostly anything to go here.</p>
<p>go on ■■■■■■■■■■ and fastweb.com for tons of scholarships you can apply to to go there. also they have work study things there, but they say its better to get your own job for more money there (i just went to a financial aid presentation there). if you get a job while youre there, it will help cover the cost of extra fees and books and the other expenses. you could definitely also save the money you made each year and keep it in savings that will go towards helping pay for some of the tuition by the time you graduate. there are also school loans you can get and stuff like stafford and pell, that way you can take some of the load off of you parents and what they can pay. if i go there, i know id have a job in the southside because its a chain and i can transfer so ik id be making money while i went there.</p>
<p>also if youre african american they have TONS of scholarships for you. i have a few friends that are and they were able to go to tons of organizations and find some and it really brought the price down a lot. unfortunately, i cant really find others for other specific ethnicities (unless youre native american or something), so you will just have to stick with fastweb.</p>
<p>Thanks for the quick and detailed response! I know I can go on sites such as fastweb to earn scholarships and I have tried that but the odds of winning are you know … slim. I’m wondering if there are any other ways to earn money like on campus scholarships and other resources. I would also try to be an RA but I don’t know how hard it is to become one. How much do you think you are going to make at a job in the school year? I would do that as well if it would help me attend. P.S. I am as white as it gets, sucks lol.</p>
<p>idt there are on campus scholarships, or at least i didnt hear of any when they talked about financial aid. they also said they have limited grant money for need based aid, so getting money from there seems like its mostly merit based or work study or getting loans. lots of ppl work during college. i think you can get paid more getting a job and not a work study, because i work at an upscale restaurant as a hostess and get paid 9$/hour plus they give raises every 6 months or so. these days, thats a good job to get because ive worked at other places and most places only pay minimum wage which is 7.25. you should really just think about getting a job while youre here. working during the year you could make a few thousand a year. i also know that waiters and waitresses at the restaurant make even more money with tips, so thats the best thing to do during college especially if its at a high paying restaurant (a waiter on a saturday at the restaurant i worked at made like 30$/hour on tips because it was busy). if youre only 5000 away from, a job might be worth it because you could probably make that or something around that if you work during the school year and especially during breaks. being an RA is really a lot of work, and idt you can be one your freshman year anyway. its a 24/7 job and you have to plan floor activities and be on the lookout for drunk kids at late hours and monitor your floor. your first year, i would find a good paying job and see how that goes and try and put some of the money into savings and keep some for like food or other stuff you need. then, if you think its not enough become an RA sophmore year.</p>
<p>Thanks for being so informative! Although I don’t think I can attend … it’s just too expensive. :(</p>
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<p>Actually, one of the things that doesn’t affect your application/scholarship is how much you seem to care. They base it on your merit or need alone.</p>
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<p>Being an RA is not hard, but it is competitive to get a spot, a few hundred students will apply to be an RA every year, for maybe 100 new openings (because once you become an RA, you are essentially guaranteed it for the next 2 years). It’s a complex application process starting with a written application and recommendation letters. This is followed by interviews (first cut I think) and group activities (second cut I think) to judge your interaction skills and management skills. After that, the current board decides who gets to be an RA the following year. And even then, you may not be placed in the dorm you wanted.</p>
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<p>No. The scholarships on campus are the ones given out when you apply. After that, there may be some small ones (like for research or whatever) but they are definitely under $5000, even under $1000</p>
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<p>Allie was actually giving some good advice: get an off campus job (lots of local restaurants, for instance, need help!). A lot of my friends did this. If you can make about $500-$600 a month (working about 15-20 hours a week), you can make enough to live off campus by your sophomore year (and thus eliminate the $5000 room & board cost). Another thing is to try and find a good paying summer job, work hard all summer, and save up on that money to use during the school year (I did this as a way to pay off rent for this past year).</p>
<p>I’d like to let it be known that it is actually possible to receive merit aid from Pitt as an upperclassman. I recently graduated from A&S in 2011 and didn’t receive any merit aid from Pitt as an incoming freshman; however, every year of my undergraduate career, I was invited by e-mail to apply for merit scholarships. Each time, this entailed filling out an online application that asked for my activities on- and off-campus, as well as a few essays. At the end of my junior year, I found out that I received a $5,000 merit scholarship from Pitt for my senior year. So, it does happen, but it is admittedly pretty rare. If I were you, zcongress, I would not put much stock in hypotheticals, such as being an RA or receiving a merit scholarship as an upperclassman, that are (sadly) not likely to work out.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, here’s a list of scholarships/awards that are available to upperclassmen in A&S annually: [University</a> of Pittsburgh](<a href=“http://www.bulletins.pitt.edu/archive/undergrad110105/7cas-b.htm]University”>University of Pittsburgh)
^Scroll to “Honors and Awards”</p>