Please help! What can outside scholarships pay for?

chrisw
Thu, 05 May 2011 19:05:05 +0000

Okay, so Penn does its financial aid as follows:


Determine Expected Family Contribution
Account for eligibility for federal and grants (i.e. Stafford Loan, Pell Grant, etc)
Meet difference between EFC and cost of attendance, dollar for dollar, using the federal work-study program and student grants.


If the expected cost of attendance is $58,000 and your EFC is, say, $30,000, you can expect to receive aid totaling $28,000. Typically, this is just applied to your student bill, but very often students who have partial aid packages make payments before the money comes in, meaning when the aid is applied to your student account, you will have a surplus.

Any time you have a surplus, the University will credit you with that money within six weeks. If you have direct deposit set up between your bank and Penn, that means that Penn’s SFS will automatically deposit any surplus you have in your student account into your bank account, and you are free to use that for essentially whatever you want.

My outside scholarship wasn’t very much, but when it came through, my student bill was already paid (when I say student bill, I mean the balance left over after considering loan credits and the monthly payment plan, so it was something like $5,000 a semester, give or take), which meant that the scholarship resulted in a positive balance in my student account. A few weeks after each semester began, I got a deposit for my scholarship in my bank account, which got mixed in with the rest of my finances, all of which were used to pay for academic-related expenses, such as books, food, housing, utilities and extra-curricular activities.