After college graduation I decided I wanted to apply for a Master’s program in Statistics. I began preparations for this program almost immediately after graduating from Willamette University. My focus in college was economics; as such I was required to take five math classes at Portland Community College and one math class at Portland State University to have all the pre-requisites from the MS Stats program.

One morning in mid-April I received a welcome letter from UCLA. All my hard work paid off and I quickly began to celebrate. As I reviewed the details of the cost, my celebration was halted. I realized it would be twice as expensive to attend graduate school at UCLA since I no longer lived in California.

The next step was figuring out how I could get in state tuition. I filled out my intent to register and claimed I was a California resident for tuition purposes. My logic was, I grew up in California, and while I have been living in Oregon for the past six years, I was in college most of the time, I still paid most of my taxes in California, and my permanent address was in California. The university rejected my claim. This meant an extra $22,000 a year for out of state tuition.

Luckily, with the rejection notice, came another letter that indicated I may be eligible for tuition exemption based on the fact that I attended high school in California for more than three years. This was music to my ears, I hastily sent in all the required paperwork. Last week I received news that I had been approved for instate tuition; this is a glorious victory that is going to save me over $45,000 over the course of the program.

Thank you exemption program :)! I still need to come up with the rest of the money, stay tuned to find out how.