So yesterday I went over to the BME office to see the graduate coordinator, Heidi. I had a problem with my registration for the Fall semester and I needed some help with it. The problem was that I am signed up to be a teaching assistant this Fall. In order to be a TA, you need to be registered for 9 credits. I had registered for 9 credits, but I was advertently dropped from one of the classes without warning. So now I only have 6 credits, and I don't have a chance to register before the TA appointments are written up. Originally I had emailed Heidi and she said that to register again I would need to pay a $25 late fee.

Also, the way that things work for TA's is that you need to pay your tuition in advance, and then a month after school starts the University will reimburse you $3000 of the tuition which means that you are responsible for the remainder. Because of that, I wasn’t too excited about having to pay $25 for something that wasn’t my fault since I had registered ontime and had 9 credits to begin with.

Anyways, Heidi helped me straighten things out, and as long as I registered on August 27^th, everything would be okay. However, here’s the surprising thing, when she went to check my tuition bill, she found that I had a zero balance. As in, I didn’t owe a single penny for my tuition. Uh-oh, I thought; my registration has been cancelled. But Heidi investigated the issue and realized what had happened. I received a fellowship for the upcoming year. The fellowship pays out a certain amount of money (which I knew about), but they also pay for the first semester’s tuition for the year that the fellowship begins (which I did NOT know about). So the fellowship had already taken care of my tuition bill for the Fall.

So I thought, okay, so that means that the University won’t be reimbursing me $3000 and all. But Heidi said that since that money is already promised through the University, I’ll still be getting a check for $3k from UT.

It was probably one of the most humbling times of the week, just knowing that God is looking out for me in all aspects of my life, including finances.