Financial Aid at LUM?

JRZMom
Sat, 13 Aug 2011 13:55:04 +0000

Hi! My D will be a freshman there in a few weeks. I know exactly what your concerns are as I put myself through school, & we needed a lot of help with the oldest kid, who is now 32. This time around, we have a higher income, but it will still be a tight squeeze to do it.

We were not eligible for much need based aid. However, Lyl was generous with merit scholarship. A big premium is placed on the first generation thing so go for it. My D had abt a 3.3 or so, though I think more APs under the belt.

One thing that makes a big difference is service oriented activities, esp at a Jesuit school. They don’t have to be religious ones. My D is a Girl Scout & did her Gold Award, which was teaching kids–and some adults—to knit at a series of Knit Ins and asking more accomplished knitters to make baby hats for the NICU in our area. She wound up with more than 400 hats and she held 3 Knit Ins, which got rave reviews from the participants (Super Bowl Sunday etc). Part of her goal was to get several generations together, and that worked out well too.

My D could not quite pull into the mid 500s in math but blew their socks off in verbal & writing. We told her not to worry bec she wasn’t applying to Harvard anyway, where this wd be an issue—and the schools to which she was applying wd not care abt the math score as long as she was not trying to get into their engineering depts. This seems to have been correct.

What grade is she in? I wd have her take the SATs for practice again & again (either for real or with a prep book) & try to get that verbal up. My D took a prep course and there was a girl in there who was just taking them over & over until she got scores that satisfied her, which were just under 800 in everything. She had another classmate who was doing the same thing. It proved to me that getting a higher score is a function of how many times you do the darn test, just like getting a better swim time or doing batting practice. Just do it.