The financial aid office commonly gets an eyeroll when mentioned due to students’ dissatisfaction with their packages, but I think people are focusing too much on the issue and not the experience. A person can dislike a situation but still appreciate the way people handle it or handle their own frustrations.
Over the summer, I would check my financial aid statement at least once a week to see if there were any changes. I noticed one week in August that the page said that based on my financial aid needs, I would receive a reasonably sized grant. Then the next week, the grant had been lowered, but a different scholarship I had been expecting was added. My first thought was that something had been entered incorrectly, because I wasn’t expecting any changes to the grant.
This prompted me to contact the financial aid office over the phone in order to figure out what I wasn’t understanding about the numbers displayed. When I called, I was already frustrated and upset because I had been planning on having that grant money alongside the scholarship to help pay my bill, putting me on edge about the conversation I was prepared to have.
The person who answered the phone was much nicer to me than I deserved on account of my attitude. While I asked why my bill had changed and got increasingly frustrated with the answer, she stayed calm and expressed remorse for the situation.
I had some difficulty understanding the reasoning behind the changes and kept having to ask her to explain in different ways. Instead of getting frustrated and passing me off to another person, she took the time help me comprehend why the changes had been made.
She offered to call me back later that day with a better explanation and breakdown of the process. It wasn’t long before I received the call back.
The reasoning behind the change was based around FASFA numbers, scholarship amounts and calculations they use to determine financial aid grants. These calculations were explained to me in great detail until I was able to truly understand the changes. For any questions I had that she didn’t know the answer to at the time, she emailed me within the next day with the answers.
While I wasn’t happy with her answer, I was grateful for the way she answered. By staying calm and understanding when I was getting frustrated, she made my experience better. It helped me realize that I didn’t dislike the office, I disliked the bill. She was even able to help give me some suggestions for scholarships to apply for in order to account for this change.
I think it’s a common experience for people to dislike the financial aid office because they don’t like what their bill is saying, not because they don’t like the office or the people in it. In life there will always be things that are frustrating or changes we don’t like, but the way people react to your frustrations and work with you to help solve them can make a huge difference in your experience.
In my experience, the Financial Aid office has been extremely helpful in understanding changes to my bill. I may not be happy about the changes, but I do appreciate the experience they provided.
