Award Cycle and Down TIme

Kristy Fix

Good afternoon. Would you be willing to share what your current award cycle looks like and how much down time you have to run cycle maintenance? Right now, our cycle is November 15 - July 31. I appreciate your help!

Jonathan Blevins

@Kristy Fix

Hello!

I oversee BBAM for a public university.

• Our application period is October 1 - February 1
• Our review/ post-acceptance period is February 2 - early May (depending on last day of classes)
• Our maintenance down time is late May - September
• And we do Cycle Management around July 1st.

Kristy Fix

@Jonathan Blevins

Thank you. We are also a public university. Do you do all of your recruitment and retention scholarships in BAM? Do you currently use auto-match and apply-to scholarships?

Jonathan Blevins

@Kristy Fix

Our recruitment scholarships are not in BBAM, we use Slate and these two processes do not touch each other. We use both auto-match and apply-to opportunities for awarding! Most of our system is set up to where students will complete one larger scholarship application (apply-to), let's say for their college or department, and then we use auto-match opportunities to delineate which specific scholarship funds they are eligible for based on their student record.

Tamara Tsang

@Kristy Fix At UCLA, we have two BAM applications-one for recruitment and one for registered students.

Our recruitment scholarship application cycle is usually open from Oct. 1 to May 1. This allows us to review and award students within 2-3 weeks of their freshman or transfer admission decision in spring.

Our registered student application is open year-round. We shut down for one week in mid-march for cycle maintenance, and reopen the following Saturday. This allows us to begin collecting applications in spring and awarding prior to our first financial aid notification letters in early July. Wrapping up our own awarding by June 30 allows our scholarship unit time to assist the departments and other schools to make their awards by the end of summer.

We use these cycles to allow our students and their families to have as much time as possible to determine if they can afford to attend, as UCLA has a large percentage of Pell Grant recipients. Waiting until the school year is about to begin or after it has started would be asking those families to pay up front and wait for reimbursement, or take out loans-something many of our families don't have the resources to do. So, we try to complete the majority of our awarding a couple weeks prior to the year's first disbursement.

NOTE: We leave the one application open year-round, because there are some departments who simply cannot award this early, because their academic programs don't make decisions until later in the academic year or need a certain course enrollment, in order to determine their eligibility for an award. So, while we aim for the majority of awards made by August 30, we do allow flexibility to incorporate later awards, but much of what we've done the past few years is assisting everyone to learn how to adjust their calendars-awarding rising seniors versus seniors in their final weeks, etc.

Russel Heskin

@Kristy Fix Our cycle is pretty much July 1 - June 28. Recruitment scholarships are all auto-match and recipients are selected in July. Our current student scholarship period is mid-November to mid-April. We also use BAM to collect Student Emergency Fund requests, which is why the system is online year-round, except for 2-3 days at the end of June for cycle management.

Lindley Davis

@Kristy Fix

We have two ‘phases’. We open for undergraduate applications (currently enrolled students) from December 1 - February 7.

We have a brief application for graduate students in the Fall from August 15 - September 15th.

Our cycle management happens mid-October. I'll admit, this is a tight window for us to turn everything around, but it works.

Alanna Shockley

@Kristy Fix
I work at a Canadian university. Our cycle runs from early January - November 30. We use the month of December for cycle management. We use the same application for entering and continuing students, but rolling deadlines (we just capture the data at different times). New High School students have a March deadline, and reviews/notifications are complete by late April/early May. Continuing awards are adjudicated through the summer. We try to have reviews/notifications complete by the end of August.

Ashley Darabaris

@Kristy Fix
Our cycle follows the timeline for admission's cycle, but typically begins November 1, with a February 1 deadline. We leave the application open for re-awards and begin cycle management ~September 15 (right after 15th class day re-awards) and take the application offline at that point. We typically need all 6 weeks to complete all of our cycle management tasks.

Mallorie Fonseca

@Kristy Fix
Hi there! At EIU, we have a variety of dates through the year and 2 ongoing cycles but the typical cycle looks like this.

We begin a cycle on November 1 (or the earliest date before November 1).

Application deadlines are typically March 15.

Reviewer deadlines are typically April 1.

We would not archive these opportunities until June 30 of the following year.

I usually complete the archiving process in June or immediately afterwards so that we would only have the current fiscal year's awards open before cloning all of them and preparing them for the next fiscal year.

So for Fiscal Year 2023, we started the cycle on November 1, 2021 with most deadlines for application on March 15, 2022 for scholarships disbursing Fall 2022/Spring 2023. But we will not archive the opportunities until June 2023 due to some scholarships that opened in March-November for Fall or this Spring. Spring 2023 is used for current students' awards and reawarding Fall 2022 awards when students did not attend/became ineligible after. But we also started our Fiscal year 2024's cycle on November 1, 2022.

Eileen Bastien

@Tamara Tsang Are you a Banner school? We just finished our first year with BAM and are looking to include recruitment scholarships in our system but am not sure how to manage the “over awarding” of opportunities while prospective students are making their decisions. How does UCLA manage this? Thanks.

Tamara Tsang

@Eileen Bastien We had to buy a second instance of BAM for our UCLA prospective student applications. With 160K+ applicants a year, and the inability to deleted users en masse in BAM, we wouldn't bring them into the main system knowing less than 10% would be admitted, and even fewer would SIR! Our student import file in that database includes FAFSA information, as well as calculated unmet need, using the need from FAFSA, minus the other gift aid. We include subsidized loans and work-study in that unmet need, so these can be reduced first if an overaward is created with a new award offer. The file -and calculations are updated nightly, so it's always up-to-date. (Not Banner-We've had a homegrown system and are switching to an Oracle product this year)