This year, I won the #OntarioGraduateScholarship for my MSc work. Sounds great, right? Well actually, winning this grant has COST me and has caused pretty substantial financial crisis. Thread 1/10
#AcademicChatter #osap #AcademicTwitter #cdnpse #onted #HigherEd #gradstudent

To start, my graduate program pays me about $15k in stipends, plus an additional ~$5k TA ship, per year. When I applied to my MSc, my advisor ( @shoshanahjacobs) won an internal grant based on my CV and accolades to fund my stipend-- worth ~$30k. Enough for 2 years. 2/10

After one year of my MSc, I won OGS, a prestigious provincial grant worth $15k (equal to 1 year of stipend). The catch was, that by accepting OGS, I lost my previous grant (which I knew).
So, my yearly income didn’t change at all. I was still making $15k plus $5k for TAing. 3/10

Obviously $20k (-$9k in tuition/year) isn’t enough to live on, so I rely on OSAP. In my 1st year of #gradschool , I received a $14,000 loan & a $4000 grant. For those following along, that's $29,000 to survive on for the year and I owe the government $14,000. Not bad. 4/10

Then, I won OGS. So, at this point, I still have inflow of about $20k a year, but suddenly, $15k of that is coming from a ‘scholarship’ instead of ‘income’. Does that sound like a big deal to you? No?
Well, it is to OSAP. 5/10

OSAP ignores $11,200 of your income during the study period, but only ignores $1,800 worth of scholarships. So, where OSAP used to see $3,800 of inflow, now they are seeing $13,200.

As a result, they only offered me a $5k loan and $0 in grants this year. 6/10

So, because I won (and accepted) a major provincial grant, I lost $9k in loans and $4k in grants, despite the amount of cash I had in hand being 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘮𝘦. 7/10

So, after accounting for tuition, I now have about $16k to live off of. That is roughly the cost of my rent for one year. Which means I now either need to get a part-time job, move to a cheaper residence (how?), or get a bank loan. All because I won a major grant. 8/10

I have spoken to @UOGStudentfin and a financial advisor and there's nothing they or I can do.
They told me that this wouldn’t have happened if I had accepted the scholarship in the winter semester—because then the $15k would be spread out over two OSAP years. Great. 9/10

So, the lesson here, is 𝗶𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝗼𝗻 𝗢𝗦𝗔𝗣, 𝗱𝗼 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁 𝗢𝗚𝗦 and also, bureaucracy is stupid and only benefits the people who are in-the-know.

Please consider sharing this with yourso that no one else gets screwed by this. 10/10