Please help! This year’s OSAP deferral date is August 19th; Since I will be out of province until September 1st, I cannot go into the admin and awards office to officially defer me OSAP fees.
I’ve emailed the OSAP staff at admin and awards several times in the last month with no response!
Do you know of any options to defer my fees without having to fly back to Toronto?
Thank you so much.
First, a lesson: emailing or calling Admissions & Awards is futile, my friend. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a response. You really can’t hold it against them either – they are insanely busy at this time of year. One’s best bet is to go there in person. But that advice doesn’t do you a lot of good, does it?
I hope you didn’t try too hard, because they won’t be able to defer your fees anyway.
For those of you who don’t understand… deferring your fees is like waiving the fee payment deadline (19 August). Well, it’s not “like” that – it is that. You are registered in your courses, without having paid the minimum installment, under the assumption that you will pay your fees whenever your OSAP money gets dumped into your personal bank account. Which, by the way, is one of the greatest feelings on Earth – a fleeting reprieve from the weight of student poverty.
But don’t get too excited, you will have to pay your outstanding tuition balance eventually (before you can pay for NEXT year’s fees). 1.5% monthly interest will also start to pile up beginning on 15 November.
There are two methods for deferring your fees. One, a laborious and traditional approach that forces interaction with your Registrarial staff. The other, a brand new and slick approach that requires the most minimal of energy inputs (the rest of your energy being spent lugging around the Calendar and Timetable, and tweeting).
Sounds nice, right? The institution is actually enabling our generation’s chronic laziness (…it’s sooo not our fault).
What is this new fangled fee deferral method, you ask?!
Beginning in the middle of the first week of August, an option will appear on the ROSI main page (near the bottom) that links you to a fee deferral request. Just follow the subsequent steps, and – if you have applied for OSAP and are eligible for some kind of funding – then you will soon be registered in your courses automatically. If you get an error message along the way, that’s either because you are ineligible, you’re not doing it correctly, or (more likely, in my opinion) the system is malfunctioning.
If everything seems to run smoothly, then periodically consult your “registration status” (indicated below your Personal Timetable on ROSI). It will change from INVIT to REG. REG is good. You want to see REG. Reg is your real friend. Invit is just a flake who will leave you… on August 20… taking all your courses with him.
If you can’t defeat some sort of error message on ROSI then resort to the old-school fee deferral method:
Locate your Notice of Assessment (or print the screen that shows your name and the chart with your funding breakdown). Bring it to your Registrar’s Office. Fill out a Fee Deferral Request form, and you’re done. If you can’t be bothered to come downtown (cause you’re a lazy generation Y member – or you live in Wawa), then fax/email a scan of your Notice of Assessment to your Registrar’s Office and follow up with an email with explicit instructions to defer your fees. It can’t hurt to call them to make sure they received it, but give them a little time first, k?
Do these options make sense? Good. Have fun “outside of the province” – unless you’re in Alberta.
Then I’ll just offer you my condolences.
