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So, the long story made short: My mom has had stage IV cancer for several years now. She went into remission last August when I started applying around to schools, but after all of my applications went out a new, inoperable tumor developed during a gap in my parents' insurance coverage. The medical costs from dealing with this have effectively erased my parents' retirement savings. My parents are older (in their mid-late 60s) and it's pretty likely that my mom won't recover this time. It's also pretty likely that my dad will need to stop working in the next 5 years or so. Deferring doesn't really make sense, given how uncertain everything is with my mom's condition - the only member of the medical team that would even give us a prognosis said "anywhere between 6 weeks and 14 years."

I'm struggling with how to include this in my scholarship negotiations. I don't want to come off like someone saying "oh poor me, give me more money" but the honest-to-god truth is that I don't have anything resembling a financial safety net, one of my parents will likely be deceased by the time I graduate law school, and the other will need financial support shortly after. This doesn't really show up on my FAFSA or anywhere else in my application and I'm not sure how to properly express this to the Financial Aid office at the school I'm negotiating with (I got through the rest of my negotiations just fine, but this also pretty severely geographically limits me so of all 15 of the schools I applied to there's really only one I can attend.) I have a solid scholarship to this school already but the one-time negotiation form is due soon and I'm still trying to figure out how to phrase all of this. Like, what details should I include? What should I exclude? Do I need to send in supporting documents like my mom's hospital bills or should I just send my other scholarship offers with a note in the comments along the lines of "hey so this is going on now and it's going to be a factor in which school I choose to attend"?

Sorry if this comes off a little jumbled, but that's about where my head is at right now and I'd appreciate some outside opinions.

AnimaIneffigiata wrote:So, the long story made short: My mom has had stage IV cancer for several years now. She went into remission last August when I started applying around to schools, but after all of my applications went out a new, inoperable tumor developed during a gap in my parents' insurance coverage. The medical costs from dealing with this have effectively erased my parents' retirement savings. My parents are older (in their mid-late 60s) and it's pretty likely that my mom won't recover this time. It's also pretty likely that my dad will need to stop working in the next 5 years or so. Deferring doesn't really make sense, given how uncertain everything is with my mom's condition - the only member of the medical team that would even give us a prognosis said "anywhere between 6 weeks and 14 years."

I'm struggling with how to include this in my scholarship negotiations. I don't want to come off like someone saying "oh poor me, give me more money" but the honest-to-god truth is that I don't have anything resembling a financial safety net, one of my parents will likely be deceased by the time I graduate law school, and the other will need financial support shortly after. This doesn't really show up on my FAFSA or anywhere else in my application and I'm not sure how to properly express this to the Financial Aid office at the school I'm negotiating with (I got through the rest of my negotiations just fine, but this also pretty severely geographically limits me so of all 15 of the schools I applied to there's really only one I can attend.) I have a solid scholarship to this school already but the one-time negotiation form is due soon and I'm still trying to figure out how to phrase all of this. Like, what details should I include? What should I exclude? Do I need to send in supporting documents like my mom's hospital bills or should I just send my other scholarship offers with a note in the comments along the lines of "hey so this is going on now and it's going to be a factor in which school I choose to attend"?

Sorry if this comes off a little jumbled, but that's about where my head is at right now and I'd appreciate some outside opinions.

First of all, that sounds like a really shitty situation. Sorry about your mom.

Since this is kind of outside the norm of what schools usually consider when negotiating scholarships, it might be worth calling someone in the admissions department and explaining your situation over the phone with them. In addition to presenting your other offers, you could just explain that you're going to need to support your dad in a few years and the prospect of taking on too much debt to attend law school might make you not go at all. They would certainly take your threat of not going seriously and if they really want you to attend it may impact how much they offer you. I've never dealt with something like this personally, so I'm not sure how likely that is to work. I would just call and try to get someone you can explain this to and see what they say.