Student story: Prioritizing financial aid in the college search

- The financial aid process was a long, arduous one for me to learn about. There are tons of different financial aid; each college does it differently. Sometimes you might have to learn about how one school does it and how another. There's a lot of similarities a lot of times so they can transfer, but you always have to be specific with any college that you look into. What I learned is that some colleges give you a hundred percent, or a hundred percent of financial aid of tuition and board and that sort of thing. When I learned of that and I learned that your parents can't make above a certain threshold for you to qualify for these sort of financial aid, I looked into what the thresholds were for some of the schools I was interested in and figured out which one offered that sort of package, and I definitely keyed in on those and sort of emphasized those in my application process, worked harder on those a little bit. It's a learning process, each college is different in some ways, one of the things I did is I contacted a financial aid officer at the school to learn a little bit more about the process, and so that's how I worked it out.