Scholarships for Welding Students

The American Welding Society (AWS) has contacted Greenville Technical College about the opportunities they are offering students for competitive scholarships. They have created the AWS Foundation which has numerous scholarship programs through which they award students. An overview of these programs can be found at http://www.aws.org/foundation/

The submission deadlines are March 1st.

Please contact DJ Wetzel at Donald.Wetzel@gvltec.edu for more information and applications.

MLK Dream Weekend Scholarship

As part of the MLK Dream Weekend, January 15 – 18, Greenville Technical College will present a $3,000 tuition scholarship to be awarded at the Diversity Banquet on January 15 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

Students interested in applying for this scholarship, along with two other scholarship opportunities, are encouraged to go to

http://www.mlkdreamweekend.com/scholarships/

to download an application packet. Deadline for entry is December 11.

New Scholarship

The C.G. Fuller Foundation Scholarship Program is once again accepting applications for the upcoming 2010-2011 Academic Year. The scholarship is worth $1,000 per semester.

To qualify, an applicant must:

• Be a South Carolina Resident
• Attend a SC College or University
• Be high school seniors entering their first year of college
• Have SAT scores that meet or exceed 1100
• AGI of parents must not exceed $60,000

All applications must be submitted to GTC Financial Aid Office by March 15th.

For Applications and questions please contact DJ Wetzel at: Donald.Wetzel@gvltec.edu

Ask the Readers! Financial Literacy Edition

You are our most valuable source of information! The world of financial aid that we live in is constantly changing. With every change that we make, we also have to consider how these changes effect you, our students. So with that in mind, we would love to hear your input on a new program that we are considering building.

Financial Literacy

This would be a pilot program to be started through the financial aid office to offer basic financial advice for free. It will be centered around paying for college, student loans, budgeting, and creating a stable financial base during, and after college. With a majority of our students here at GTC receiving student loans, financial literacy has become a priority. We will discuss topics such as repaying your student loans, managing credit, creating a budget, repairing bad credit, and discuss where to go when you run into financial difficulties.

We feel that a program of this nature will help you to feel better prepared to enter into your chosen career as more well-rounded, capable individuals. A solid financial base is essential to your future success and that is what this program to designed to teach.

Please give us your feedback. Is this a program that would interest you? What topics would you like to see covered? Would you spend one hour in a free workshop to learn about managing your money?

As always, thank you for your participation in this blog! We cannot do this without you!

Oral Roberts University Scholarship

I received a notice of a scholarship for any students who are interested in transferring to Oral Roberts University. The Whole Person Scholarship is a "generous scholarship for ambitious, well-rounded students to aspire to the whole-person ideal of intellectual, physical, social, and spiritual development.

To be considered for this scholarship you must be nominated. Our financial aid office will nominate one student from Greenville Technical College for this scholarship so please apply now!

The nominations are currently being accepted and the deadline is January 4th.

If you are interested please contact DJ Wetzel at 864-250-8987.

Mid Semester Check-Up

The temperature is dropping. The leaves are falling. Tests and other school work have entered into a frenetic pace. Christmas is just a little over 2 months away. This time of year brings to mind a few things: picking apples, carving pumpkins (and roasting pumpkin seeds!!), raking leaf piles, and unfortunately, FLU season. With the threat of the regular Flu and this new fangled H1N1 virus, many doctors are warning us all to be wary and constantly monitor our symptoms. I would like to propose a somewhat gloomy analogy…. Just like our doctors have given us warnings and precautionary measures to protect ourselves from getting the FLU, there are also some things that you can do to make sure your financial aid doesn’t keep you out of school for next semester! Stick with me, because I think you will find this information very helpful!

Tip # 1: Make sure your financial file is complete!

Hopefully by now you have already submitted a FAFSA and you have already heard back from our office letting you know whether or not we can complete your file, or if we need more information. If you have received an award letter and returned it back to our office, then rest easy, your file is complete. If you have not received an award letter, please contact our office as we will need additional documentation to complete your file.

Tip # 2: Make sure you have received all of the awards you are eligible for!

Run a quick check on your award letter and compare it to your account summary on Campus Cruiser. If the numbers don’t seem to add up, please take a moment and see if you can determine where the shortcomings might lie. If you still cannot seem to decipher the numbers, give us a call and we can look into it for you. If you have been awarded grants, loans, or scholarships that are not accounted for in your account summary, please give us a call.

Tip # 3: Have you gotten your refund check?

We have been working frantically to get all loans certified and all refund checks mailed out to students as soon as possible. I am very happy to report that as of today we are up to date with loan certifications. What this means for you is that if your loan has not been certified then there is a problem with your loan eligibility. I would recommend contacting our office to determine what you can do to correct this. Secondly, if you have not received your refund check you may wish to check with us, but if you have received your “Official” award letter, then rest easy, because your refund is on the way!

Tip # 4: Are you maintaining Satisfactory Academic Progress?

In order to maintain your eligibility for federal financial aid in the next semester you must maintain a minimum 2.0 cumulative GPA and maintain a cumulative 2/3 completion rate. How are your grades looking for this semester? Are you in danger of slipping below the critical 2.0 GPA mark? If so, there are numerous ways to find help in ensuring that your GPA does not suffer this semester and you can maintain your financial aid well into the future. You could contact Student Support Services and request a tutor, you could contact your professor and see if they can provide additional assistance, you could form a study group with your classmates to try and get help from your peers, you could even visit the GTC library and utilize their resources. If you think you might be in danger of falling below these standards, please contact our office. We can sit down with you and discuss your specific situation and see what can be done to keep you above the standards and maintain your financial aid.

I hope you have found some of these tips helpful! We want to hear from you so please let us know if you would like to see more of these tips, if these tips did not apply to you, or if you have additional questions outside of these tips!

As always, thank you for visiting and please tell all of your friends. Together we can make financial aid work for you!

Financial Aid Refund Checks

It has been a few weeks since my last blog post which can be directly attributed to the rush of Fall registration. Over the past few weeks I have been getting numerous comments and questions every day through this blog that pertain to financial aid. These comments have been wonderful and I am very appreciative for all of your feedback. Recently though, the vast majority of these comments have surrounded one topic: REFUND CHECKS. This is the time of year for financial aid refund checks to go out so I wanted to shed a little light as to how these checks work.

The basic concept is that if you are awarded financial aid over and above what your tuition costs are, you may be eligible to receive that overage in the form of a refund check, which you can then use to cover other educational expenses (IE. housing, transportation, textbooks, personal expenses). Many of you may be wondering if you have a refund check available. The simplest way would be to consult your award letter. If you have awards showing on your award letter that total up to more than your tuition costs are, more than likely, you will receive that amount in a refund check. You also can check your account summary on Campus Cruiser which will show an updated amount of a refund. It is important to note, that not all types of aid are able to be refunded to students. Lottery tuition assistance can only be used to credit tuition and many scholarships have a stipulation that they cannot be refunded to the student. So if you have a question about your particular refund, please contact our office at financialaid@gvltec.edu

The majority of students who receive some form of a refund, do so by obtaining a student loan. Student loans are processed differently than grant and scholarship aid and therefore, the refund checks are also processed differently. Scholarships and grant aid are automatically applied to student accounts on our disbursement date which is 9/8/09 for the Fall 2009 semester and 2/1/09 for the Spring 2010 semester. Loans are also disbursed on that date, but only if they have been certified. The certification process takes 4-6 weeks from the date that you turned in your award letter. When we certify a loan we send a request to the lender that you have chosen, and request the loan amount that you have signed for on your award letter. Once the money is released from your lender, those funds come to us and we then transfer those funds to our business office for them to process a refund check.

Our business office legally has 10 business days to process a refund check. This means that even after your financial aid has been credited to your account, it may still be up to 2 weeks before your refund is actually mailed out or direct deposited. Our business office sends out refunds every Friday. For the Fall 2009 semester the first batch of refund are slated to be sent out on September 18^th, 2009. Refunds will be sent out every Friday after until the end of the semester.

I hope this answers some of the questions that I have heard regarding financial aid refund checks. As always, if you have further questions do not hesitate to leave a comment and a financial aid advisor will respond as soon as possible. Thank you for your time!