The Office of Financial Aid

Scholarships, Stipends, and Performance Agreements

The types of payments Financial Aid will process are limited to scholarships, stipends, and performance agreements for currently enrolled undergraduate UC Riverside students. 

Graduate student payment requests should be routed to Graduate Division (contact: Omar Faustino-Carreon) or School of Medicine student payments should be routed to School of Medicine (contact: Theresa Luther). 

Financial Aid uses WorkFront as the online project management tool to process scholarship, stipend, and performance agreement requests. You can access WorkFront through R’Space under the Trainings and Tools section.

Definitions

Scholarships are financial support for students to pay for educationally related expenses. They are earned by meeting criteria of the scholarship donor/organization. Some are merit based and some are financial need based; some are a combination of the both. Some scholarships can be renewable with certain criteria needing to be met (such as units required, GPA, financial need). Scholarships can be from on campus departments or outside agencies. 

Stipends are financial assistance or support paid to university students. There should be no obligation to perform any assigned tasks or specific projects and no work should be assigned, according to this chart from Accounting.

Performance agreements are payments for services rendered through an executed agreement, request to be submitted after service is provided.

Timelines for submitting your requests

Scholarships and stipends processed after the Financial Aid Office creates financial aid offers may result in a reduction of aid previously offered, so it is best to make awards before the Financial Aid Office determines eligibility for other funds. Financial aid offers for the new year are usually released during late June. 

We encourage you to submit your requests by this timeline, of early summer. If you cannot submit your requests by that time, then please submit as close to the start of the traditional academic year as possible.  

The Financial Aid Office will still process requests after financial aid offers are made, but please inform your students that this new scholarship/stipend may not result in a refund. This is due to the adjustments that may occur to other aid, in order to fit in the scholarship/stipend. For more information, please read the "How Financial Aid Processes Your Request" below. 

For the Summer term: The summer term is the start of the new academic year. You can submit requests as early as April however Financial Aid may not be able to process it that early if the system setup for the new year is not yet completed. 

Processing timelines

During non-peak seasons, it will take Financial Aid 2-3 weeks to process requests. During the peak season of July-October, it will take 4-5 weeks to process.

Priority deadlines

The goal of the priority deadlines are to ensure that the scholarship or stipend is processed in time for the fee payment deadlines. The deadlines are posted on the Academic Calendar. Requests should be submitted with enough processing time in mind if you want these awards to be processed by the fee payment deadlines. Financial Aid will continue to process all scholarships submitted after these dates; these deadlines are the last dates in which we can guarantee processing will be completed prior to the fee payment deadlines or fiscal year-end. 

Year-End deadlines: Please submit your requests by June 13 in order for Financial Aid to process your request before fiscal year end. Requests received past June 13th run the risk of not being processed before the fiscal year end closes. Please plan accordingly.

Late awards for the academic year that is ending is allowed through September 30th. For example, a late award for the 2024-25 academic year is accepted until September 30, 2025. Please note: Processing a late award will likely require adjustments to a student's other financial aid and this may cause the student to be billed back. Please adhere to the priority deadlines whenever possible.

WorkFront Instructions & Summary of the Process

Review this user guide to learn: how to submit the proper WorkFront request ticket, learn about the funding process, understand how financial aid will process your request based on federal aid and award limitations.

Forms

In the event you're having trouble downloading the form through Workfront, you can access the forms here.

• Scholarship Form
• Stipend Form
• Performance Agreement - embedded within the WorkFront ticket

Funding Information

Given the new Oracle Budget environment, you will no longer need to transfer funds to Financial Aid. We will instead process a transaction to your department’s Fund and Activity under Function 78 and BC 35. This transaction will create a deficit to the departmental account unless your funding is already sitting in BC35 Function 78 or you immediately do an INTRA org transfer in advance of your request. However, this deficit can then be addressed internally using an INTRA org transfer. The advantage of this change is that it should no longer require for an INTER org transfer to be processed, which requires multiple approvals, and will allow for requests to move forward sooner since we will no longer need to confirm receipt of the departmental fund transfer before proceeding.

For Contract & Grant funds:
Funds will need to be budgeted into BC35. You will be asked to provide the project number, projection expiration date, and total award amount on the ticket for.
For Non Contract & Grant funds:
You will be asked to provide the fund number, activity (for which FA will create a deficit on), and the total award amount. 

How Financial Aid Processes Your Request

When a scholarship/stipend gets processed through Financial Aid, every effort is made to ensure the student can see some of this funding, within the federal regulations we operate under.  

These are the four possible outcomes that may happen when we award your source of funding to the student: 

1. Refund: A student may receive a refund if they do NOT have an existing balance on their Student Account. Financial Aid may be able to award the full amount of the scholarship/stipend however if the student has a balance on their Student Account, then their award will be used to pay down or pay off the balance first. The Student Business Services Office will determine if the student can be refunded or if the new award will be used to pay off an existing balance. If a credit still remains, then the Student Business Services Office can refund it. 
2. Reduce loan debt: When processing the new source of funding into the financial aid offer, it could require reducing loans to fit the scholarship in. Although the student may not receive a refund, this is still a positive outcome as it is reducing a student’s indebtedness.
3. Revision of other grant funding: If needed, Financial Aid will exercise this option. This would mean that Financial Aid will reduce a grant to add in the scholarship/stipend, dollar for dollar.
4. Return the funding: Financial Aid will exhaust all available options before getting to this step. However, when a student is maxed out on their Financial Aid (i.e. they have received financial aid up to their cost of attendance) and there are no other adjustments available to make, then Financial Aid will not be able to add the award. Financial Aid will return the funding to the scholarship donor/campus department/academic unit.

For more information about federal aid and award limitations, please review our guide linked above.

Contact Information

Fiscal/funding:
Alexandra Mayer, Fiscal Analyst
Cesar Lopez, Fiscal Manager

Scholarship awarding and processing:
Monica Martinez-Daniels, Scholarship Manager

Work-Study

In this section you'll find information about the hiring process for work-study students. You may contact workstudy@ucr.edu for more information for the topics below.

Onboarding

Once students have been offered a work-study position, they'll need to fill out the Work-Study New Hire Form so that it may kick off the onboarding process by sending out a Work-Study Student Employment Contract via DocuSign. This DocuSign envelope will ask students and/or supervisors to submit the following:

• Student Employment Contract — requires signatures from both student and supervisor
• Federal Work-Study Eligibility Notification — so that supervisors know a student is indeed eligible for work-study and can see the amount they were awarded (to help with tracking later)
• A copy of the job description/posting from Handshake

You can review samples of the documents named above in this PDF. 

Once this process is complete, a member of UCR’s Financial and Administrative Support Team (FAST) will contact the student to schedule an in-person or virtual onboarding appointment. The student will have to submit a new DocuSign packet. Once the FAST representative has finished processing and updating UCPath, they'll notify the work-study program that the student is ready to start working. Work-study representatives will email the student and supervisor when the student may start working. You must wait to receive the Letter of Clearance before your student can start working.

Payroll

Students are paid on a bi-weekly basis. Please review the payroll calendar so that you can help ensure your student's timesheets are submitted by the due date. You'll want to submit them by the dates in the column titled “Employee Cutoff.” Please note that some pay periods have early cutoffs. Work-study representatives will send e-mail reminders for off campus work-study supervisors, however, please make note of these dates.

Timesheets are required to be approved by the supervisor. For on-campus supervisors, please submit your student’s timesheet as normal through Time and Attendance Reporting System (TARS). For off-campus supervisors, work-study representatives will process through the UCR Time and Attendance Reporting System once they receive an emailed copy of the student's timesheet that has been signed by the supervisor. Please share this timesheet infographic with your students if they need help in understanding the process and how to fill out their timesheet.

How to Become a Work-Study Partner and Hire UCR Students

For more information on how to become a work-study partner and/or how to hire a UCR student, please visit the Career Center’s webpage.  On-campus employers can get additional information about work-study on this page. Information for off-campus employers is available on this page.

Increases to Work-Study Allocation

When there is available work-study funding, students may ask for increases to their work-study award by filling out a “revision request” through the Financial Aid icon in R’Web . If that option is not displaying in R’Web, please email our office at finaid@ucr.edu.