Happy New Year’s Eve! We at Kaplan have enjoyed launching the Graduate Advisor Insider, and bringing you more great content in 2013 is at the top of our list of New Year’s resolutions. And for any student who is heading to grad school in the fall, January 1st is a very important date: The new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) becomes available.
Filling out a FAFSA at http://www.fafsa.ed.gov/ is a critical first step in financing any degree, and students should submit one as soon as possible. States have individual deadlines that are all almost sooner than the June 30th federal deadline, with some as early as February: The full list of state deadlines can be found here. The earlier students knock out the FAFSA, the sooner they can get a comprehensive picture of their finances for the coming year.
Once students have completed that key first step and begun doing a scholarship search on the FAFSA site, they can check out Kaplan’s event recording on financing grad school. In this seminar, Kaplan’s Director of GRE Programs, Lee Weiss, gives students an in-depth look at the different sources of grad school funding, gives students the tools they need to craft their financing strategy, and offers additional resources to continue researching scholarships.
Planning the best way to finance a master’s degree can be a daunting task – many students are so focused on just being accepted to their target programs that they don’t consider how they’re going to pay for it until later in the process than they should. If students start now and break the process up into manageable pieces, however, then they’ll be in a great position. It all starts with the FAFSA – filling one out should be part of every student’s New Year’s resolutions!
