hey hi good afternoon good evening depending on where you're joining us from thanks for joining the webinar today to talk about our reconsideration process which just opened today um my name is Alice young my pronouncer she her and I'm the director of admissions for outreach and recruitment um and I'm joined by some colleagues here in our admissions and financial aid office um do you want to introduce yourselves really quick I'm Amanda puron I'm the director of public interest financial support
hi I'm rosanah Hill Thomas associate director of financial aid and I believe we also have Aubrey um joining us as well who also works in our financial aid office um so we have a few of the folks here who who work in Admissions and financial aid um they are going to be helping answering questions throughout this process I am going to leave a substantial amount of time at the end for your questions but in the meantime if you do have something you'd like to ask now um if you could please use the Q&
A feature and that is how we are going to organize the questions try to answer them and then um if we can answer them via typing we will answer them at the end um so hopefully you can all see my screen okay um I haven't heard otherwise so I'm hoping you can um and we'll go ahead and get started so just a little bit of an overview today for the next hour um we are going to be giving an overview of gift aid in general what do we look for um what does the timeline look like between initial offers a
nd reconsideration um where we're at with our awarding process what is reconsideration um I'll walk you through what that looks like um some important notes things to keep in mind um and then frequently ask questions and then there'll be a good amount of time for questions that you have so first off just in general to give an overview of our process Gift Aid what do we look for um we do not use any sort of matric like elsat or GPA when we are awarding Gift Aid we do a holistic review just like w
e do with our General Admissions applications where we go through and read your whole application your cast report all of the um pieces of your application that we have in order to assess for merit Aid um and these obviously we have a very competent pool of admitted students who have already been admitted and are amazing and so how do we differentiate between all of you so these are the sorts of things that are listed here on the screen that we look for we also when we're doing our comprehensive
Gift Aid review we do consider need-based Aid so in other words there's not a separate process for need-based Aid or um what you might think of as financial aid um when you were admitted you should have been sent the supplemental gift date application um we ask that you complete that within a few weeks of your um the date of your admission um and that asks uh questions about your Current financial circumstances and also historical information as well as far as um any sort of financial obstacles
you might have faced growing up so it's pretty comprehensive of both current and historic IAL circumstances and that is what we use to determine need so as long as you have as long as you as sorry as long as you have submitted the SGA um you are being considered for need so there's nothing additional you would need to do for that um if you haven't submitted the SGA it's not too late to go in and do that still um and you do get a confirmation email when you've submitted that um if you want to go
back and look through that um and so those are going to be awarded again with our general Gift Aid so um you when you received a gift aid offer from us whether it's initial offer or reconsideration it could be based mostly on Merit mostly on need or a combination of that okay so a little bit about the timeline and where we are at um as I mentioned the SGA has been rolling sort of since we started admitting people back in November um and we were also sending out initial gift data offers um start
ing in December um through basically yesterday um so you can think of our gift a processes sort of two distinct processes so there's an initial gift aid process that happens and then there's a secondary round which we call reconsideration which just opened today um so most of you all should have heard um by yesterday if you were receiving an initial offer or not um unless you were very recently admitted so if you were admitted in March in the first week of March um we are going to ask for you to
just immediately go into our reconsideration process in order to be considered for a gift aid for those of you that do hold a gift aid offer from us most likely you have a deadline of April 1 um you can see here on the spreadsheet too we have General um enrollment decisions uh deadlines which are April 15th and May 15th what are those so April 15th you have an option to say yes I'm definitely coming to Berkeley I'm tentatively accepting which is basically maybe I'm still weighing offers or I'm
still waiting to hear from you all on gift date and I need additional time or you can withdraw at that point if you select the tentative option you have until May 15th to give us a final decision however if you have been awarded Gift Aid you are going to have a separate deadline and that is the deadline that you should be using in order to give us a firm yes or no decision um so the the decision dates of April 15th and May 15th you can just think about as general enrollment decisions and if you
are awarded gifted you are going to have a separate date and that is the date where you have to give us a final yes or no decision so that we know if you're not coming we can reward that money out to people in the reconsideration pool reconsideration open today that is going to run through April 29th um we are going to begin awarding for reconsideration next week so the earliest that you will probably hear back from us would be March 27th and after that point we send decisions sort of every few
days once or twice a week so we can try to get back to you as soon as possible and hopefully by the date that you've indicated you have a deadline from another school um and then for those Awards most of the de the deadlines that we are going to be giv giving are anywhere from early April through the end of April or even in May depending on when you're given that award so just make sure you pay close attention to the date um on your gift aid letter okay so where are we at I think I covered most
of this already um if you do have a gift aid uh decision already with a deadline coming up um so if you have for example an April 1 decision and you were thinking about going through the reconsideration process we would recommend that you go through that soon so that we can try to get you out a decision by that April first date um if you submit for reconsideration and you have a deadline coming up from us from an initial offer and you haven't heard from us by that date you should email um admits
law. brookley in order to request an extension of your initial Gift Aid offer um we do try our best to try to as long as you submit it within time to still review and get you a decision by that initial date but sometimes you may need to request an extension so just email admits that's indicated here um and then just a note um for those of you sort of just about our general process um I know it was disappointing to receive the no email that many of you got yesterday that is not at all an indicat
ion of whether or not we want you to be here and be a student at Berkeley law it's really more of an indication just of our financial circumstances we have a very limited budget we have over a thousand students that have been admitted and we're just unable to give every single person award and if we did that it would be a very very small award um and so that's why we've decided to sort of separate the process into two distinct um um processes sort of the initial review and then reconsideration w
here um in years past there's been about 4 to 500 people that apply for reconsideration so it's a smaller pool than our general pool and it also shows indication from you that you're interested in us so we can make sure that we allocate the funds that we do have to the students that are most likely to attend Berkeley law so I do apologize if you got that email and you were disappointed um but unfortunately it it's pretty normal for most people to not get an initial offer and to go through recons
ideration and I've seen it many many times that people are able to get a substantial offer later on in reconsideration so it does not mean that you're going to get a total no from us so we do recommend if you're still interested if you're watching this and you're kind of wondering what does this all mean like please indicate your interest go through reconsideration and you do get it's a completely new review We review um everything you've indicated in the reconsideration form and also we go thro
ugh and review your admissions application again everything that you um initially applied with your cast report and also the sgaa if you submitted that okay so having said that reconsideration just a general overview what is that um so if you um either have an offer from us or you don't have an offer from us and been admitted elsewhere I'm sure that's the case for most of you because you all are amazing and you know you've been admitted elsewhere you probably have offers from other schools as we
ll that you're considering and you have a pretty short time frame in order to make this huge decision um in order to streamline this process um we have created this formal reconsideration form for um everybody to fill out we found that this is the best way to keep track of everything and also to make sure that we are trying our hardest to to review those and get them out to you um in a timely fashion so um there's a form that you can complete um if you want us to look at another offer um if um f
or whatever reason you don't have other offers or you would just like to uh submit the form just based on financial circumstances or you've had a major change in your life or health or anything like that over the last few months and it would look different than when you initially applied you can also submit the form based on sort of change or EXT in circumstances as well and there's some more information in there for you to complete that if you felt like maybe the SJ didn't capture your complete
Financial circumstances we give you um another spot to basically tell us more about what we should uh know about your financial situation okay so if you have um already received a an initial offer you may not be eligible to complete reconsideration those awards are listed here um and the reason being that all of these are substantial Awards um that if you went through reconsideration we probably wouldn't be able to give you anything more than what we already have and so that is the reasoning wi
th that um if you have questions you're welcome to email us but um the reason yeah the reason is that most of these are either full tuition or close to full tuition um and to give you all an idea it's in our fq sheet about sort of where our median award stands um for last year our median award was $32,000 a year our 25th percentile was $20,000 a year and our 75th percentile was $5,000 a year um so most of the awards listed here are sort of within that range um and that is the reasoning of why um
we don't want to make you go through reconsideration when most likely we wouldn't be able to increase those awards at all um so in order to submit reconsideration there's the form that's on the admitted students website um it is uh only a one-time form um so when thinking about when to apply uh we've already seen a a good amount of people that have applied today um but it is open until the end of April so because it's only you can only submit it once we do request that you sort of wait until yo
u have a good idea or at least wait until you sort of heard from your top choices about not only where you're admitted but where you're receiving Aid I know a lot of you were still waiting for decisions um some schools have indicated they're coming out with scholarship decisions on particular dates so if there's a school that you're really waiting to hear from or or a date that they've given um it might be beneficial to wait until that time in order to apply so you could definitely still apply l
ater on in April um even the end of April it's not a first come first serve we do allocate our budget for the entire reconsideration process so don't feel like you have to rush to submit today or in the next few days um because every year we have that happen where somebody submits on the first day and then a week later they receive this really great offer that they're considering and now we might have already gotten back to them about um reconsideration they can't submit the form again so if if
that's the case where you just feel like you're not really sure where you're at right now and you still need a little bit of time um feel free to take that time until April to to kind of get a sense of where you're at um and in the form we're just going to request some basic information from you the reason for your request documentation um so for those submitting um you know the vast majority of you submitting with another school's offer we just want like a PDF of that offer um we're going to as
k you what the other offer is per year if it comes with anything else like housing stipend summer funding anything like that we're going to ask you the deadline date um and then there's a text box in there which is further information basically clarifying your reasoning um reiterating your interest in attending Berkeley law if there's anything else that you feel like we should know about and that's sort of your place to kind of indicate your decision-making process in there um so important notes
I think I already covered the first one that you can only submit it once again we apologize about the restrictive nature of this it's just with handling four to 500 requests if everybody were to submit it multiple times we would never be able to actually review and get back to people in a timely fashion so this way we can prior prioritize reviewing and trying to respond by that other school's um date um another note about Gift Aid as far as what you should ask for we get a lot of questions abou
t this because in the form we do ask that you actually give us a dollar amount that you're requesting and um we only our our gift aid only covers up to the cost of tuition we don't provide stiping or anything like that so the maximum that you can request would be that full tuition depending on if you're a California or non-california resident um once uh I'm sorry I'm just trying to read through this um once you've submitted the form you will receive an email decision from US unless you withdraw
we are going to rec considerer your request live um and it's not just a simple like yes or no or we are going to match what you're asking or not um sometimes it could be more sometimes it could be less um you are going to get a thorough review and you will receive an email decision from us even if it's past the date uh the deadline that you put in there we are still reviewing most likely we just have a backlog of people that all had the same date um so unless again unless you withdraw from us un
you're no longer interested we are still going to be reviewing and getting those out as soon as we can and we are again we're going to give you a specific deadline usually we give it try to give at least two weeks for you to make a decision and get back to us um and you are going to have to give us a firm acceptance or withdrawal you don't get that tentative option if you get a gift date offer um okay so this is sort of an update for this year we're trying to provide more information to you for
you all to make better decisions about how to go through this process um so we get a lot of questions every year about which offer should I use I've got a lot of different offers from schools some of them are ranked more highly some of them are full tuition and I'm just not sure what to submit um so in an effort to provide a little bit more guidance we actually did do a sort of a big data analysis this year we went back and looked through three years of reconsideration data um and we looked at
all of the offers we've received from from which schools and which ones we were able most likely able to match or give a substantial amount of what you're requesting on so the schools listed here represent the offers that we um that you all used the most that we saw most in the process and also the ones that we were able to either match what you were asking for in the uh reconsideration request or partially match it so we were able to maybe give 75% or more of what you were able to um what you w
ere asking for um so our guidance is going to be if you have an offer from one of these schools you should try to use that um I know some of you have multiple offers from some of these schools so if that's the case um then I would use the the school that you're most likely considering other than Berkeley law um if you don't have an offer from one of these schools or maybe you do but you are actually considering another school you can still submit that to us in the form there is an an other schoo
l section and then it'll ask you which other school that you're considering and you can give us more information we realized that sometimes you are looking at those other offers maybe it's full tuition maybe it's a school that's um local to you like in the state that you're in maybe they offer like offer some specialized programming and that's why you're considering them um so you you can still submit that um again when you're looking at like asking us how much you're asking for if you do have a
full tuition offer from another school especially if it's not one of the schools listed here most likely we are not going to be able to offer a full tuition offer so just keep that in mind when you are um you know putting in your request for what you're asking for I think it's kind of got to make sense um so yeah General guidance is try to apply with one of these schools but of course if you have something else just use that text box in there about your decision-making process to contextualize
that a little bit for us and explain why that is the other offer that you are most strongly considering um and then another note just a about comparing offers um a good way to think about it is um looking at total cost of attendance the reason being um there's a lot of variation in tuition costs especially amongst um public schools and private schools uh so for example you know amongst um most of our sort of peer schools our tuition is going to be lower than most um but we are in a little bit mo
re of an expensive area than a lot of other schools so you can look at total cost of attendance to kind of see overall out of pocket what does that look like um and then just a note on cost of attendance make sure when you're going to other schools websites for that um some of them don't list the student health insurance fees and and don't actually list that in there when you are paying for that in fact um or they might put like a little Aster and then the amount at the bottom so just make sure
you're comparing Apples to Apples with that and you're getting the correct amount um because most schools including ours do include the student health insurance fees and that can be a difference of you know10 to $20,000 a year depending on the school um so just to get kind of an overall cost analysis that's the best way to do it um but of course you're going to be looking at other things uh you're going to be looking at career placements particularly for whichever sort of practice area or indust
ry you're most um um interested in um if you are going um if you are focused on public interest then looking at um support in the career development office um what their lrp program cover um do they have Sumer funding what opportunities do they have for first year students for public interest these are all going to be things that you're looking at um and then of course the non-quantifiable factors such as location culture programming where you see yourself practicing um after law school all goin
g to come into play um so just a quick comparison with cost of attendance I've listed here as an example for Berkeley law if you were to receive gift aid of 30,000 um what that would actually look like for your total cost of 108,000 so subtracting out the 30,000 for gift aid your net cost is going to be 78,000 this is assuming you're not a California resident um School a you're going to get the exact same offer but their tuition is about 10 grand 10 grand more expensive living expenses are sligh
tly cheaper so your total cost is going to be 114 which leaves you a little bit actually more on the net cost of 84,000 um school be again you've been offered exact same their tuition is slightly higher at 70 but their living expenses are much cheaper at $23,000 a year so you've got your total cost there of 93,000 and your net cost um so you know and as an example and I'm sure you're all keeping your spreadsheets of all this information of exactly what you can look like to make these calculation
s um I think I only have a few slides left so we should have a good amount of time for your questions um I just want to cover these ones uh before we go into those because these are ones we receive all the time and it's just easier to talk about it now um so what if you have an a quote unquote exploding offer from another school how do I let you know how fast can I expect to receive response so this is um the practice some schools employ of giving a scholarship offer and giving you you know 24 4
8 hours to decide um it's not something that we practice just because we do believe uh we we want you to have time to think about that and not make this huge decision in a very stressful day or two um but some schools do do that um you can submit the reconsideration form and there's a question in there about if your offer has a deadline within the next five business days so make sure you select yes and then when we are looking through our spreadsheets of that data it'll be highlighted so that we
know to try to review those um that being said if it really is within one to two days most likely we're not going to be able to get you a response within a day or two um keeping in mind again we've received hundreds of requests so um if that's the case go back to the school the other school and ask for a deadline extension um I don't know if they would be willing to get that or not but that would be your best case um scenario otherwise most likely we're not able uh to to respond within a day or
two if you have a week you know we can try within that time but within a day it's just really tough um so just keep that in mind when you're thinking about the process um let's see so you've not received your initial gift date offer should I wait um before requesting reconsideration um so as I mentioned most of you should have received some sort of decision about initial Gift Aid whether or not you received that um and so you should proceed with reconsideration for those of you that were recent
ly admitted and you haven't gotten an email yet about in Gift Aid offers you should proceed directly into reconsideration for that um and then I've got several offers from schools that I'm considering Can I submit multiple offers um how do I decide which one um where I'm hoping with a guidance this year that that'll help kind of narrow down um which one to select um unfortunately we do just allow the one um and it's helpful for us to know which one you are most highly considering if you were to
give us the five of the different offers that you have um from a reviewer standpoint for us it's hard to know them within that list of schools which are the ones that you're actually most likely to attend so that's why we do ask you to narrow it down to that one school um I'm still on some of my top choices wait lists um should I request reconsideration now with um an offer I have or should I wait to hear back from those schools um so it sort of depends I think if you if you haven't gotten an ad
missions decision yet um you could wait um a little bit of time I mean I would probably wait a couple weeks to see if you're already on a school's wait list it depends on the messaging they send out a lot of schools don't plan on actually going to their weight list until later on in this summer so if that's the case um I would submit reconsideration with an offer that you have now um and keep in mind when you do accept our offer um you do have to withdraw from all other schools except for school
s that you're on a wait list for or if you've not yet received a decision from you can still wait to hear from those so um it doesn't really hurt to apply earlier if you do have another offer that you need to get back to and you want to submit reconsideration with that because you would not have to withdraw yet um so I submitted my Recon uh request for reconsideration on March 20th um I still haven't heard back yet what should I do um as as we mentioned we are trying our best to get uh to review
those by the the decision that you do Post um sometimes we're not able to do that so if it gets to be like the day before another school's deadline the best course of action would be to go back to that other school and request a little bit more time um to make a decision and explain that you're still waiting to you know receive other offers um schools are usually receptive to this especially if you do give a good reason um and if you give them a date within like a week of your deadline um if yo
u just ask for a blanket um extension they might say no to that but I think if you give good reasoning and you give maybe you just need a few more days generally they're able to extend that and then we do our best to like try to get back to you as soon as possible so that you can make that informed decision um okay so I sent in another offer and the school's deadline was April 10th it's April 9th and I've not heard back from you um what should I do I think I has covered this basically we try to
ask for an extension even if that date has passed that the deadline for the other school we are going to still consider it a live request unless you email us or withdraw in Cal Central and say you're no longer considering Berkeley law um and then I think the last one here I covered um about removing yourself from other school's weight lists um and then just a quick note about other types of Aid um outside of our general gift aid process we do have continuing student scholarships so all of the gi
ft day that you receive as a oneel um is going to be uh uh continue through your second and third year as long as you remain in general good standing at the school um but we also have specific scholarships that you can apply for as a second and third year student so many of our students are able to get additional money for their second and their third year um we also have um work opportunities students are able to work as research assistants um or GSI their second or their third year of law scho
ol um we have outside scholarships on our website um we have a huge list of outside scholarships that you can apply for and you can search by key terms and apply for those and a lot of students are able to successfully get even those small awards that can really help to add up um and then just contact information and resources um if you're a public interest student and you want more information about our El program there's a whole website dedicated to that um that Amanda runs and there's videos
on there and a ton of information but if you did want to have a one-on-one counseling appointment you can also make that directly with her um general questions can go to admits law. Berkeley um if you want to make have financial aid questions want to make a financial aid appointment um our financial aid team has those on their website um there's a few other resources listed here for specific populations that you might be interested in um and then just a a quick note that if you are uh if you do
have any sort of special Financial circumstances if you're an international student undocumented you have adverse credit history um your military or veteran anything like that um where you think uh your financial situ situation or eligibility for a gift aid or loans might be different um we do recommend you you make an appointment to talk with a counselor about that [Music] um okay okay I think that was all of the presentations we've got a good amount of time 30 minutes to answer any questions y
ou all have would you like to look at these or do you want me to read them aloud for you you have a lot for you sure if you want to read them okay um do you have a median amount of time that someone will take to get a reconsideration response from us um no I don't I mean off the top of my head that's not some of the the data crunching that we've done so not not anything concrete that I could give um I will say like so we do try to prioritize to get people decisions back that have early deadlines
so if you for example submit today and you have an April 1st deadline we're going to try to make sure you get a decision uh back before that um if you submit and you have a deadline later in April it's completely possible you might not hear from us till a little bit later uh so if you submit and don't hear from us within a week or two that's completely normal um but yeah it's kind of hard depending on the deadline and how fast you submit and how like much time you you have really um can you tel
l us you have any updates about Hyundai Kia that doesn't happen until April or May does it and Ikea yeah that one is I believe we only have two or three awards for that and it's specifically for those that applied for it in their application and wrote an essay about like your interest in you know Tech and Engineering um those ones do sometimes go out through reconsideration sometimes they go out later in the spring or summer so it depends but we do only I think we only have two awards for that s
o it's not an award we we're giving out a lot if that makes sense um what is the sort of documentation you can provide as a competing offer from another school would an email suffice yeah any kind of written documentation you have that lists like the school name the the award amount in there for your first year and all for all three years that would be fine um an email it doesn't have to be the official PDF letter that the school gives you but we do it in written form and like a verbal offer wou
ldn't count okay um what would you say is a what is a peer school is it T14 T20 how would you define such a thing it's hard yeah there is there's no definition um that we particularly hold for a peer school and so that's why in that list that we came up with we didn't directly refer to it as um a peer school um we if you're asking about as far as like how did we calculate the that or how do we come up with that list that we gave of the schools again that's purely from the data of this the school
s that we see the most in this process and the ones that we are most likely to be able to match or give a substantial portion of the awards you're receiving from those schools um but outside of that we don't have like a general definition for peer School um if are you at a disadvantage in the reconsideration process if you have already or you intend to do like a a hard confirm of your enrollment at Berkeley um sorry could you repeat that question Amanda yes if somebody is has already intended to
enroll in Berkeley as in they've accepted their offer of admission does that put them at a dead at a disadvantage in the reconsideration process um so not necessarily keep in mind though if you have already committed to attend Berkeley and you were awarded gift aid with that and you've um you've accepted your gift aid award you can only go through reconsideration if it's a new offer that you recently received um but yes you can still go through reconsideration and you wouldn't be at a disadvant
age okay comparatively How likely is a student awarded gift date on the basis of financial need versus a competing offer especially if we are waiting on another offer or Aid package and are worried about the deadline this person's probably weighing when they should do the reconsideration form based yeah that's what I'm versus Merit that's that's kind of what I'm what I'm thinking that they're asking um so every year we do have students that go through the form that are purely applying for need u
m and I think it can be a compelling request if there is additional information that wasn't init initially captured in your sgaa if you feel like you submitted that you provided you know all of the questions you answered sufficiently and it captures your need situation um you you might not get a different response from us if you go through reconsideration but there are cases where something has come up recently you need to provide further explanation about a financial situation going on in your
life or a health situation something like that um where we really do see a need for additional Aid and are able to award that um so if you're kind of weighing I mean as I said you do have time it just opened today so do not feel like you need to submit the form today day or in the next week if you want to sit on it for a couple of weeks and see where you're at then and if you've gotten any other offers um or if you have you know a a good offer from another school that you want to submit with I w
ould recommend you do that um and if you do decide you just want to go ahead and apply with the need um just think about you know I would go back into your SJ look at your responses and just provide make sure you're providing us additional information that wasn't captured in there what percent of students still receive no gift aid after reconsideration um or perhaps if you also want to chime in about how many people are successful in [Music] reconsideration yeah again off the top of my head I I
don't know those specific numbers we did list in our FAQ document for last year 54% of admitted students were offered gift date so again due to our budget we are not able to offer a gift date for every single person so it looked at you know at about 54% for admitted students and then I can tell you for students that decided to come here um that jumped to I think over 80% of our actual matriculated one L's had received gift aid from us which kind of makes sense because a lot of the people that di
dn't receive an offer might have gone to a different school um but I can't tell you specifically I mean other than those numbers what what your particular uh percentile would be or or chances would be for that okay if somebody is going to do reconsideration soon because maybe they have an April 1 deadline at another school but they are also interviewing for full ride or or large offers at other schools that will happen later should they mention those interview processes in their reconsideration
form yeah it can be helpful to know I mean obviously we don't know the outcome of that yet um but I think if you have an April 1 offer and it's a strong offer that you're actually you know you are going to potentially enroll there um then I would submit that um if at the end of the day you're going to turn down that offer and wait to see your other offers anyways um and if you have it like a full tuition at another school that you're going to hear from you know the first week or two of April the
n you might want to wait so it kind of again depends on your decision-making process of what you're most likely going to accept but yeah if you have an April 1 that you you are most likely going to accept um and you're not going to wait to find out the outcome for that then um then yeah you can go ahead and submit that and you can tell us you know you might be a finalist for something else but you're not sure yet okay someone says I have a significantly higher offer from a T20 um school not one
of the ones listed in the drop down and a decent offer from one of the listed schools would you advise using the offer from the listed school or from the higher school and they're considering both of those schools yeah it it's hard to say I mean our general advice is going to be to use an offer from one of those listed schools um the reason being is that we generally are able to match those you know especially if it's a partial award if you have a full tuition offer from a school that's not list
ed there most likely we're not going to be able to offer you full tuition or kind of close to it so I guess it depends on you know and and again I would use the one you're actually most likely considering so if you really are going to accept the full tuition then you can apply with that um and then just think about kind of your reasoning for putting that in there but our general advice is going to be if you have an offer from one of those schools listed I would apply with that okay someone says
they were accepted but considering taking a year off to strengthen their application and try to increase the amount of scholarships they rece receive would Berkeley welcome my application again or would I be at a disadvantage for not accepting this year's offer yeah that's a good question um and and one that we get from some people that are are kind of in the situation or thinking about working and saving up money for another year and going through the process again um so absolutely you can deci
de to withdraw and reapply again and you're at no disadvantage we see this quite frequently um and we understand you know if you didn't decide to come here last year particularly if you do make a note in your application next year that you know this was the reason you had offer you had an offer from us maybe you had other great offers and you just needed to save money and you wanted to go through reconsider uh the scholarship process again um so you wouldn't be at any disadvantage I would recomm
end actually uh withdrawing and reapplying rather than deferring um because when you defer you you generally are not going to go through the process again for scholarship so it's it's going to be better for you to um to withdraw and just reapply again as a new applicant okay someone is saying in our explanation of our reconsideration request should we discuss the cost of attendance at the other school or focus more on the qualitative difference um that's up to you we we see people talk about bot
h so I suppose it's sort of what is most important to you I think for a lot of people it does come down to finances so making a note of that you do only have a limited amount of space so I you know it's about a paragraph a few sentences so you could always I wouldn't make the whole thing about finances but you could have certainly mention just a quick cost comparison and then talk about your reasoning for why why you you see yourself being at Berkeley law um over the other school but you know we
don't expect like a super in-depth comparison of like our programs or anything like that we just kind of want to know you know uh why is this the other uh offer that you're considering and and basically why do you see yourself here okay and my or our apologies if we have been confusing someone says I'm seeing two different answers regarding the March admits who have not received an offer one says we're still being considered for merit a need-based date and there's no rush to submit a reconsider
ation request another says we can expect to not receive an initial offer and we should do reconsideration can you elaborate sure and I apologize if we've given out different messaging on that um so my understanding is um I believe the people that were admitted in March it was like March 6th 7th and 8th um those were the groups so if you were admitted on one of those days just because it was so recent you are not going to get a response for like initial Aid uh so in order to be considered for a g
ift aid you should submit reconsideration there's no rush on that you don't have to submit it right away but um but you shouldn't be waiting to hear from us um so that I I believe is the policy and I'm sorry if it was stated differently elsewhere by me someone's asking um can we um do like a print out of the q&as for this Zoom to put on the admit website like in the answered questions oh um I mean we are recording this and this will be posted in its entirety on the admitted students website um w
e could probably look back at the q&as that were asked and maybe add some of them I don't know if we would add all of them just because the FAQ document is already at like 10 pages so uh but yeah we could definitely look and see if we're getting asked the same question a lot and add it back to the document okay um someone is saying can you buypass the sgaa form and just go straight into reconsideration yes a lot of people do um sgaa um I I will say sgaa doesn't just ask about financial situation
there it does ask questions about other um Scholarships in there so some of our donor funds have specific um funding terms they're looking for different profiles of people so we ask a lot of questions on there that are not Finance related so we that's why we do recommend everybody submit sgaa whether you feel like you have Financial need or not um but a lot of people either basically say I I don't think I qualify for need or just don't submit it and you wouldn't you just wouldn't be assessed fo
r need in that case okay someone says what if Berkeley is our only other offer of admission at the moment or the only offer of admission that ends up happening is the default intent to matriculate a good enough reason to submit for reconsideration AK what do you do when you have no other schools for comparison yeah um again I can't stress this enough like take your time see what happens in the next few weeks like I know from talking to colleagues at a lot of other Schools they're still getting o
ut a lot of decisions and have a huge chunk of their class to fill up so it's not uncommon for schools to still be getting back to folks in the next few weeks even through like mid to end of April so that might change um so I would wait um if you're still at the end of April and we are your only option um then the only other like real process you would be able to go through is asking based on need so if you feel again like you have Financial need that maybe wasn't um reviewed or you have additio
nal information you could submit that to us okay um I have another question here I've drafted a reconsideration letter but it's over the word limit in the form I feel like 150 words or 1,200 characters and not is not enough to fully explain my circumstances and reasons is there a way I can instead upload a PDF document with a longer word count um we would prefer for you not to so the the upload function that we have there is going to be for like the other award letter so I don't believe you're a
ble to upload multiple documents um and we realize the 1200 character limit which is about a paragraph isn't giving you a ton of space um but the reason we limit it is just again because we have so many people going through reconsideration hundreds of offers and we're not only looking at what you write in there and just your general request but again we're looking through reading through all of the information submitted so um just to save us time we do ask that you try to compress everything dow
n into that space thank you okay someone says they have an April 3rd deadline for a competing offer is it likely that Berkeley will be able to respond to um their reconsideration request before then yeah so we know that a lot of schools just like we do with initial offers have a deadline of April 1st or April 2nd or April 3rd somewhere in that time frame um and that's why we do request like if if you if that's the offer you want want to submit with um I would recommend submitting reconsideration
as soon as possible so either like today or tomorrow in the next couple of days um so that gives us time and um hopefully you would be part of that first group or the second group going out um before that the your deadline day so you know we do our best as we've said we do our very best to read and and try to get back to by that time so as long as you give us time and apply as soon as you can um most likely yes we would be able to get back to you but we just can't guarantee it no more questions
right now if we want to wait 30 seconds to see if any more appear sure you have any final words Alice well thanks everyone for joining us it does it looks like somebody else is raising their hand so maybe you're you're typing so we'll stay on for another minute to answer any last minute questions okay we have two offers for the same dollar amount one at a school with a similar cost and one with a higher cost will Berkeley match the dollar amount or focus on the different cost of attendance um I
don't I mean I think that's probably getting a little too granular um if if you have two schools with similar offers again Our advice would just be to choose the one that you were most likely considering um we're looking at a number of factors we're not just comparing dollar amounts we're not looking at ranking or a number of things we're looking at what you're talking about in your request as well so I don't know if we have a definite answer to that question someone says if we receive zero dol
lars from Berkeley initially but we have about a 70% scholarship from one of the schools listed in the dropdown is there a chance they could get a similar offer from Berkeley yeah definitely um and this is what I was trying to say earlier probably not particular eloquently in the fact that we can't give a lot of initial offers and it's not uncommon for people to receive or to get no initial offer from us but to submit a very compelling um case through consideration and have this great offer and
we are able to match those sometimes so definitely I've seen people jump from having no money to like a very substantial like almost full tuition offer based on requests so it's definitely not out of the the ballpark and you should submit that request okay someone said I'm still confused about the sgaa versus the reconsideration form for March admits um I thought you mentioned we should go straight to reconsideration if we were admitted this March but then you said not to skip the SGA does this
mean we should just submit both at once yes yes so sorry the sgaa is not like a a it's just our financial aid form you can think of it like that so you should definitely still submit the sgaa if you want to be considered for need-based Aid it just means like you shouldn't be waiting to hear from an initial offer from us so once youve submitted sgaa you should submit reconsideration but at any point it does not have to be right now you could wait and see what your offers are and apply later for u
s for reconsideration so sgaa in other words is not going to like trigger a response from us I hope that answers yeah Hing that two parts of this um question okay um okay I don't are there's no other questions that I see so I think we're gonna end it there um but thanks so much for joining this is going to be posted for future viewing if you want to go back you can always make an appointment if you would like to talk with somebody a little bit more if you have additional questions um and thanks
so much everyone for for being here and thanks for Amanda and all the rest of the financial a team for for being here and helping out with the questions thank you
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