As the law bursary deadline is at the end of the month, I thought it would be a good time to put on my Law Financial Aid hat and answer some of the most common questions I get about the law bursary program. If you have additional questions, please reach out to me at debkennedy@uvic.ca.
What’s with all the deadlines?
UVic Law is fortunate enough to have its own Financial Aid Office that comes complete with its own bursary program and its own Financial Aid Officer (me!) to administer the program. This allows the Faculty to give individual attention to its students who have unique needs from those who attend other faculties in the university. It also takes some of the stress off the financial aid office that works with the entire student body of 22,000 students (Student Awards and Financial Aid or SAFA). However, students in Law are still eligible for all of the services provided by SAFA, provided there are not better ways to meet their needs with Law programs.
This explains all of the deadlines.
The law bursary intake is through the OCEAN. The general bursary intake is through your UVic student online portal.
Law does their intake for their bursary program first in time. The deadline for the application itself is June 30 every year (or the nearest non-weekend date). The documents are due August 15 (or, again, the nearest non-weekend date). Why is this? Students who are eligible for the law bursary need to (in all but very few cases, which are generally ineligibility) apply for student loans. The process between application to a student loan provider and receipt of a confirmed notice of assessment can take up to 6 weeks. It’s not a coincidence that there are 6 weeks between June 30 and August 15.
You can also consider the time between those two dates time for me to administratively deal with the applications, letting students know what documents they still need to upload. It’s additionally time for students to figure out things like their taxes and their GST credit. During those 6 weeks, as well, students who have trouble applying for student loans for whatever reason have some breathing room to figure it out. It’s basically 6 weeks for all of us to get our ducks in a row for that August 15 deadline.
August 15 is the typical date that the intake for the general bursary (the one for the whole university administered by SAFA) opens. It’s due typically around October 15. By August 15 when this application opens, the hope is that you already have your student loan situation settled, your tax situation settled, and any other situation that might make applying for this general bursary settled. In short, these multiple deadlines, while confusing and potentially hard to remember, are in part intended to take some pressure off our students during the term so they are not taking time away from their studies while they are trying to work through what the general bursary looks like.
But what if I can’t get my ducks in a row by the deadline?
The Law Financial Aid Office at UVic is one Financial Aid Officer. That’s it. There is one person (currently me!) behind all of the figuring, sorting through paperwork, and adding up numbers. And I am fairly organized. Every year I keep a running list of students who can’t meet the deadlines for whatever reason. Most of the time, this is due to an issue with student loans. Some of their student loan notices of assessment from some provinces have arrived later than expected in recent years.
We are prepared for this situation. And, by that, I mean me. I am prepared for that situation. If you reach out to me prior to the deadline and articulate an issue that has come up with the completion of your application, most times I will work with you. It’s simply not a big deal. There are enough things to stress out about in law school. Applying for a bursary shouldn’t be one of them.
What if my student loan portal opens up later than expected?
This happens. Student loan portals should generally open for Fall and Winter around the first of June. Sometimes, they are late. There are real people working behind those computers, too, and sometimes they run into problems like anyone else.
If you try and apply but are not given the option of applying for fall, it probably just hasn’t opened for fall. If you are worried about missing a deadline when this happens, just reach out. Continue to check back with the portal. Apply in a timely fashion. We can work through this. Breathe.
Can the Law Financial Aid Officer help me with my student loans?
I mean, generally, sometimes, maybe, yes. However, the better place to go is SAFA (finaid@uvic.ca). They are the resident experts on all things student loan. They sign student loan paperwork and can answer questions for you like whether you are in an undergraduate or a graduate program (hint: JD and JD/JID are undergraduate programs for all purposes except on campus housing). They can even help you with the application so you don’t make a mistake and end up needing to amend your application for student loans (which can be much more of a headache than getting it right the first time).
Do I need to hit the submit button on my application in the OCEAN?
I love this question so much. I mean, really. I just get a kick out of it. If you could see what I see, you would understand and laugh with me.
Once someone has put an application in the OCEAN in “draft” form, I can see it. In a perfect world, an application would be submitted to “In Progress” by June 30 and “Submitted for Final Approval” for August 15. However, many students forget to submit or leave their applications in “draft” form entirely until I actually physically submit it for them.
It’s fine. This is fine. It’s all fine.
Other students really, really need for their application to be “Submitted for Final Approval” at all times. You cannot upload documents once your application is submitted, so, I often find documents missing and return the application to “In Progress” for them so they can submit documents without a hassle. But then they go back and submit the application again. I am sure students think, “I already submitted this. The submit button must not be working.”
No. It’s me. It’s just me. I’m trying to help you.
As long as I can see your application, I will process it. I will look through what you submit and ask you to submit what you forgot. If you submit absolutely no documents by the August 15 deadline, I may not remind you. However, if you are missing one or two documents, I generally ask for them.
The summary of this is just this: complete your application. Don’t worry about what form it’s in. If I can see it and make sense of it, I will process it.
Are all students eligible for law bursaries?
No. Our bursary program is meant to be a way even the playing field for students who are not in as strong a financial position as others. It’s a way to bridge a gap for some that simply doesn’t exist for others. We do not have the budget to provide every student with a bursary.
We find that the term financial need is incredibly relative. We have students who come in to our school from all walks of life, and every one of them has a slightly different definition of what financial need means. My office generally uses objective standards to determine who qualifies for financial need.
With that in mind, students who are able to do so are also expected to contribute to their own education. They are expected to work on their non-academic terms and save money from that work. Students who have significant assets are considered generally in a better financial position than students who have none.
The following students are not eligible for law bursaries (but should check with SAFA about whether they are eligible for general bursaries or other funding):
- Students on a co-op work term
- Students enrolled in less than 4.5 units in a term for which they are applying for a bursary (3.0 for CAL-registered students)
- Students who do not fund their education with student loans (with rare exception – ineligibility)
- International students
- Exchange students studying at UVic (as their tuition dollars go to their home institution, rather than the institution they are visiting on exchange)