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Financial Aid Application

• Personal • 168 words • 1 minutes to read

I got turned down for CalGrant this year. For those not familiar, CalGrant is the California State College Grant System. CalGrant has three flavors: A, B, and C. Apparently, my Tech School Bachelor program doesn’t qualify for C; My wife and I make too much money for B (the cap is $30k per year); and I don’t have enough “need” to qualify for CalGrant A.

Anyways, I’m sitting here filling out a scholarship application through my school. After I got past questions like “Full Name”, “SSN”, and “Is a third party contributing to your education?”, I get to the essay part. “Please write a one page essay that describes your need for a scholarship award.”

I could go into how $49k per year for two people with an infant in the SF Bay Area is barely livable, but mainly I just want money for college. Who really wants to pay back $37k worth of tuition? It wouldn’t take me a page to explain that, only a few sentences.

Ryan Parman

is an engineering manager with over 20 years of experience across software development, site reliability engineering, and security. He is the creator of SimplePie and AWS SDK for PHP, patented multifactor-authentication-as-a-service at WePay, defined much of the CI/CD and SRE disciplines at McGraw-Hill Education, and came up with the idea of “serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud” while at Amazon Web Services in 2010. Ryan's aptly-named blog, , is where he writes about ideas longer than . Ambivert. Curious. Not a coffee drinker.