Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Turning bad into good.

First: a little background. In Ontario, there's provincial funding for school called Ontario Student Assistance Program (loans, of course, lets not get crazy here). OSAP has a basic minimum academic requirement to maintain in order to get your next loan - which is passing 60% of your courses. If you don't maintain this, your file is red flagged and you have to meet with a Financial Assessment Officer and explain why you suck and explain via letter to OSAP why they should just hand over the damn money already.

As you can guess, I went through this process many, many times. Like, every semester from January 07 to April 08 (summers included). Ahem.

And the lovely Officer assigned to my file is a wonderful woman who got to know me quite well (as we've already established) and has been an amazing asset to have over the last year. In fact, she was the one who arranged for me to come back a semester earlier than I expected on full OSAP, among other things.

This February I was preoccupied with the whole Mexico fiasco and forgot to apply for the semester bursary in the time the application window was open. I sent off a panicked email to her and she promptly replied that she couldn't do anything until everybody elses applications were disbursed (April), but after that she would drop off a paper application for me at the Registrar's Office for me to fill out. I did so, and today I received confirmation that I received 650$ as a bursary.

See? Amazing.

1 comment:

Britt said...

Yay for nice people!