Nov. 16, 2015
Kyle Guthrie
[email protected]
The UCCS Financial Aid Office hosts a series of lectures for students seeking financial advice.
Mountain Lion Money Matters hopes to provide students with financial advice they will need in the near future. The topics include everything from rebates, scholarships and coupons to loan repayment.
Nicole Gomez, loan counselor for the Financial Aid office, discussed the diversity of the workshops offered to students.
“We have workshops such as ‘The Art of Couponing’ and ‘Game of Loans,’ which is geared more toward seniors or graduating students who are going to be in loan repayment soon,” Gomez said.
“We have done ones on identity theft, budgeting, so they’re more geared towards life skills, and revolve around things that students told us they wished they had learned before moving out of mom and dad’s house,” she said.
Gomez said the general life skills and budgeting workshop benefit students the most.
After coming to UCCS in 2011, Jevita Rogers, director of the Financial Aid Office, said in 2012 the university applied for a grant, which helped lead to Money Matters.
“We were awarded the grant, and it was geared toward financial literacy for graduate students,” she said.
But the office wanted to expand the audience who could benefit from the talks.
“We did not want to limit it to just graduating students,” Rogers said. “So we took it upon ourselves to extend it further. The purpose is to increase financial literacy for the student body.”
Rogers said the Financial Aid office is working hard to get word of the seminars out to students in a variety of ways.
Michelle Toro-Dietz, assistant director of Financial Aid, mentioned other incentives to attend the seminars.
“We are starting to get a group of students coming to each one,” Toro-Dietz said. “We provide a card for them, and if they go to three workshops out of five, then you get a free T-shirt.”
“We have students that are coming to all five, and they’re starting to come together. That engages them on campus and they want to be here and belong,” she said.
What: Final Mountain Lion Money Matters
fall workshop ‘Game of Loans’
Where: University Center 122
When: Dec. 3, 6 p.m.
How much: Free