A Round Peg In A Square Hole: (Or, How I learned to love and hate the financial aid system!)

Well, here I am, sitting around waiting for the Brunel University Financial Aid Office to tell me whether or not I can go to school this fall. You ask why this is so. The answer is as perplexing as it is complicated.

To begin with, I have already secured a direct (Stafford) educational loan to pay my tuition at Brunel, and this leaves a small amount for books and supplies: the total amount after tuition is paid is a little over $4,000.00 total. And here’s where the complicated stuff starts.

You see, although I have a separate $35,000.00 in guaranteed pre-approved “direct-plus” (indirect) loans from Sallie Mae that would let me pay for a place to live and be able to eat while we’re in London (while also paying bills here at home), it is not up to me or Sallie Mae to determine if I actually receive the money. That decision rests with the folks in Brunel’s Financial Aid Office, who have a system and a formula I must fit into, because all students are evidently the same to them.

Instead of being who I am, a 50-something man with a wife (who is forbidden to work while in the UK because of immigration law changes), a mortgage and bills at a house back home to pay while I pursue my life-long dream of finding “the real Shakespeare”, I am forced into becoming a 20-something student with no worries, no cares, and no bills at home to worry about as I blithely sail over to the UK and put off the real world for another year or so and study for some useless degree or other that I may never use.

So there you are. I have absolutely no idea what will happen next, but I believe that all of us are trying in good faith to resolve the situation, including the folks at Brunel. We'll see how it turns out, but at this point I am not very hopeful, to be honest.

That siad, we are still going to try and go, no matter what. We are still planning to sell my vintage Firebird and see if we can get rid of some art and our museum-quality piano if we don’t get the money. That and a really all-out yard sale on August 6 should make a difference. How much of a difference? We still don’t know how much we’ll need at this point, so for now we play the waiting game. Thanks for reading!