Award Adjustment

General Discussion for SMART Scholarship Recipients
guest2
Posts: 9
Joined: Thu Apr 12, 2012 12:16 pm
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Award Adjustment

Post by guest2 »

Has anyone requested an award adjustment? If so, have they heard anything back about it yet?

strocchi

Re: Award Adjustment

Post by strocchi »

Do you mean changing your institution, estimated date of completion, things of that nature? I have tried requesting a scaled back # of years for enrolling in the program, but at the end of your program time (3, 4, 5 years, what have you), the SMART team is expecting that you will graduate.

guest2
Posts: 9
Joined: Thu Apr 12, 2012 12:16 pm
Contact:

Re: Award Adjustment

Post by guest2 »

Yes, those...I requested a new institution, but I'm interested to hear how any type of award adjustment request worked out.

smart_hopeful

Re: Award Adjustment

Post by smart_hopeful »

Yes, I originally applied for graduation in January 2014. Turns out I'm actually graduating in December 2013. The difference is literally a matter of days and it won't affect SMART's expenses (since Fall 2013 will be my last enrolled semester regardless). I'm hoping it'll be approved without a hitch.

current_recipient

Re: Award Adjustment

Post by current_recipient »

smart_hopeful wrote:Yes, I originally applied for graduation in January 2014. Turns out I'm actually graduating in December 2013. The difference is literally a matter of days and it won't affect SMART's expenses (since Fall 2013 will be my last enrolled semester regardless). I'm hoping it'll be approved without a hitch.
Keep in mind your graduation date is the date when your degree posts to your official transcript. For my university, it could be as little as 1 week after finals (December) but as many as 3 weeks. Accounting for holiday breaks, that put my graduation date as mid-January. My completion date was actually September/October! But because of university timelines for PhD completion, I had to wait several months to get a degree on my transcript.

As well, SMART is only concerned with the those dates insofar as your service commitment is concerned. Further, they're only concerned as to whether you are going to school for either a partial academic year, or a full academic year. If you only are registered for Fall semester (December completion) they don't care that you put down a graduation date of January as long as you are not registered/attending classes for the Spring semester (the one which begins in January).

The only people in this scholarship mechanism who would care about graduation in December as opposed to January is your SF. And they will likely not care too much as the process to hire you is so complex that nailing down the specifics of a hiring timeframe to +/- within a week of your degree completion is near impossible.

In short, submitting a change form to switch your graduation date from January to December, unless explicitly told to do so by your Cohort Administrator, is a gigantic waste of everyone's time.

Also, you may go out of program compliance if your school cannot get your degree posted to your transcript by December, and you have to wait until January to submit transcripts. There's a deadline to get your transcripts (with completed degree) submitted and processed to the SMART Program after your graduation date. I believe it's 2 weeks (pretty tight) though it could be 30 days. In my experience, SMART would tend to be understanding in that situation, but maybe not. New management is in town.

smart_hopeful

Re: Award Adjustment

Post by smart_hopeful »

current_recipient wrote:In short, submitting a change form to switch your graduation date from January to December, unless explicitly told to do so by your Cohort Administrator, is a gigantic waste of everyone's time.
I am inclined to agree, however I specifically emailed SMART before I submitted any change request. Here was their reply:
If your term officially ends in December, you may submit an award adjustment request online. If the term officially ends in January, you may keep the date as is.
The term officially ends in December. Possibly I should have interpreted "may" as "don't bother", but since the date really is December, that second sentence makes it look like they'd prefer me to make the change.

I am not quite absolutely certain, but I'm pretty sure my university posts degrees to transcripts on graduation day - usually about the 15th of December. At any rate, final grades for graduating seniors are due on the instructor side much earlier than for everyone else. I guess the actual smart thing to do would have been to ignore the issue. Still, I didn't want red flags and warning flares to go off at the SMART office when my end-of-award-date didn't match the graduation date I wrote on my acceptance paperwork.

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