Over the past year-and-a-half, students and administrators have been working together in the First-Generation, Low-Income (FGLI) Committee to address gaps of resources for underrepresented students on campus. (You can read a more detailed interview about the history of the FGLI Committee here.) I’ve been involved with the committee since it was created the spring of my first-year in 2017, and have focused on both financial aid initiatives and academic accessibility via the Office for Equity and Inclusion.

A topic of conversation was the financial aid application process itself, and how it’s stressful waiting until late June/July to find out your financial aid package. As it stood, the deadline for all documents was May 15th, just after the CSS Profile closes. However, due to some changes to the documentation required in the application, Wesleyan’s financial aid office now creates our packages from the previous year’s tax forms (i.e. 2017), rather than the current year’s (i.e. 2018).

Because moving the deadline up doesn’t affect the availability of the necessary tax forms, the financial aid office decided to push the deadline four months up to January 15th, 2019 so they can receive all information faster and give us notification earlier. When searching through my emails, I ~discovered~ that this was announced in November, with some subsequent reminders of the new date.