If you are strongly considering USF, check out the raise.me site where you can earn micro scholarships for different things like grades, perfect attendance, volunteering...Not every college participates but USF does so if you want a little extra money, it's a good way to get it. You can also send UCF your scholarship package offered by USF and see if they will come close to it. Have you even applied/been... Source: over 1 year ago

If you reported the raise.me before you got your finaid offer, they may have initially wanted to give you 20k in grants but they give you 18k in grants and 2k in raiseme instead. Source: over 1 year ago

As far as I know, all my merit and raise.me stacked when I got my aid package. Whichever ones they choose to award you get applied, but don't quote me 100% on this. I'd try emailing the financial aid office to make sure though. Source: over 1 year ago

My school counselor encouraged us to fill out our profile for raise.me last year to the junior class, but only two of my schools do micro-scholarships & I feel like they'd probably give scholarship offers larger than this anyway based on my stats. I guess it's mostly just the tedious work of typing up my transcript getting to me because I already had to do this twice. Thoughts? Source: over 1 year ago

Onto your questions. No, dont pay the $200 deposit. Call them and ask what they want you to do. Yes, FIU accepts raise.me. If your merit tuition scholarship is $1,500 a year, and your raise.me is $2,500 a year, it is likely that what they will do (usually) is replace the merit scholarship with the raise.me microscholarships. As such, instead of $4,000 a year (combined sum), you'll probably get the $2,500 a year.... Source: over 2 years ago

If you want a good tool and supporting bootstrappers, then go for https://nusii.com/. Source: 7 months ago

You could use an online proposal tool for this maybe? I use Nusii for this -> https://nusii.com. Source: about 2 years ago