The Unofficial SMART Scholarship Forum

I need advice on how to not be a full time student.

Next semester is my last one and I only have one class left to complete.
SMART is being super frustrating because they are insisting I must be full time so I have to take an additional 3 classes for no reason at all.
It's a total waste of my time and total waste of money in general.

Is there any way around this?

It's bureaucracy. It would presumably take a lot of extra work on their end to make this exception for you and they don't have any incentive to do so. Suck it up and take some fun classes. Take some extra classes in your program that you'll learn something from or take some PE credits or easy humanities classes. It sucks but you'll manage.

At my university, there was a waiver you could get from the registrar to say you were a full time student even though you didn't have a full course load. You had to justify what you were doing with the additional time (usually working on your thesis/dissertation) but as long as the form had my advisor's signature, the registrar never gave me any trouble. I used that form for 4 semesters while wrapping up my dissertation and SMART was fine with it.

You should see if your school has something similar.