About

Hello everyone! My name is Rebecca Gardner, and I’m the primary writer and creator of StudentLoansNoCosigner.org.

I am currently employed in the financial aid department at a prominent university in the southeastern part of the United States.

I have been working in the financial aid sector for various colleges and other postsecondary institutions for about ten years—ever since I graduated from school back in 2001.

During this time I have accumulated a wealth of knowledge about getting financial aid, and paying for college.

I ultimately figured that my expertise shouldn’t only be utilized at my position as a financial aid counselor, and that is the main reason why I created StudentLoansNoCosigner.org.

Main Ideas

So now you’re probably wondering, “is this going to be just another education blog?”, or perhaps, “what is going to differentiate this site from other financial aid websites?”.

In my opinion these types of questions and concerns are warranted, as there is an abundance of quality resources online that talk about financial aid, and how to pay for college.

Despite this, I found that most of these resources:

• All said basically the same thing—gave the same information
• Didn’t provide a significant amount of unique material
• Were very bloated—couldn’t find what you wanted
• Some gave a substantial amount of false and out of date information
• Few gave detailed advice from an expert point of view

After surveying the landscape and identifying these problems with the current financial aid resources that are available online, I knew that I had to take action by creating my own website.

My goal is to basically put together a site about financial aid that can address some of these problems I found with the current material that exists online.

This means that StudentLoansNoCosigner.org will:

• Contain original information and assets
• Be efficiently organized and simple to navigate
• Provide up-to-date and truthful information at all times
• Attempt to give readers answers to questions on a 1-on-1 basis
• Develop and grow a community about financial aid over time

These are my main objectives with this site, and hopefully I will be able to achieve these goals now, and in the future moving forward.

Contents

So essentially I have broken up the type of content you will find here into three categories:

• Bedrock Content
• Specialized Content
• Community Content

Bedrock Content

Bedrock content is the material that I feel everyone who is interested in financial aid should know about.

This content will:

• Provide a basic understanding of what financial aid is
• Explain how to apply for aid each year
• Define all the major types of financial aid—grants, student loans, etc.
• Explain the process of applying for aid in detail

Ultimately this is the content that can introduce you to the financial aid process, and help give you a general background of what getting financial aid entails.

Specialized Content

The next type of content will consist of information that I consider to be specialized, that is, it will be detailed information that will get into the nuts and bolts of applying for aid.

Examples of this type of content include:

• How to complete the online FAFSA
• Deciding on whether to apply for a certified, or uncertified private student loan
• How to get a private student loan with no cosigner
• When to apply for PLUS Loans

This type of content will address the microscopic issues that you wish some of the bigger sites would explicitly address.

Hopefully my experience working as a financial aid counselor will allow me to create an abundance of specialized content that will educate both students and parents about making the financial aid process more efficient, and frankly more useful.

Community Content

Community content is the material that you all create. This should come in the form of comments, guest articles, forum participation, and hopefully from within additional community based features in the future.

One of my primary goals with StudentLoansNoCosigner.org was to create an online community that would be able to provide a forum for interested parties to view, and participate in.

Hopefully that will eventually happen, as it will only increase the overall strength and utility of this site.

Moving Forward

Now that you all know what StudentLoansNoCosigner.org consists of, I urge you all to:

• To participate on the site—via comments, forum, etc.
• Contact me about guest posting if so inclined
• Ask me any questions at all via the contact form
• Read over all of the information found here thoroughly
• Tell your friends and colleagues about StudentLoansNoCosigner.org

I will make every attempt to keep all of this site’s content up-to-date, and will be adding new material and functionality hopefully on a regular basis.

Over time my main objective is to make this site a reputable resource that is looked upon with confidence in the financial aid community.

To all my readers and users, I say good luck in your quest to pay for school, I hope this site can make this process at least a little bit easier, best regards.

Rebecca Gardner