Bay Area and Loan or Bust

After a couple of weekends sans travel, I’m looking forward to a five day trip to the Bay Area this weekend. I’m traveling for the first time with my new girlfriend, which should be awesome! (incase you read this), and we will be staying at my sister’s place in Berkley, which should be interesting (but nothing to worry about - also incase you read this). Aside from mini diversions to Stinson Beach, Sausalito, and Napa and/or Sonoma, I’m hoping to mainly meander throughout the city and to fit in as many food/wine stops as our appetite and tolerance will permit. I’m also looking forward to a huge crapes and fresh fruit breakfast at Mama's some morning. I have a great picture of the church next door to Mama's that I took the first time I went there for brunch and now I always think of it when visiting SF comes up. Another fun happening would be to meet up with any SF LBSers that may read this. If there are any out there and you're interested, please leave me a comment or send an email and hopefully we can coordinate.

In some LBS related news, I’m finding that funding options are fairly scarce for someone with my profile (may fit well with LBS’ diversity goals, but banks certainly don’t love it!). Being an Iranian resident/citizen living in the US, but going to school in the UK, appears to be the perfect storm for being excluded from nearly every scholarship and loan out there. The loan programs that are available are the LBS/HSBC arrangement (far from guaranteed), and with a US cosigner, the ISLOAN and IEFC programs. As for scholarships, the LBS managed, but highly competitive, Vodafone, Citigroup, Mark Le Goy, and Merrill Lynch are available as is the Aga Khan Foundation’s scholarship/loan award (I missed the 03/31 deadline). What’s sucks is that despite LBS’ generous financial need bursaries, my making US wages places me outside of the financial need range, but this doesn’t take into account that I may not have any other funding options available to me. I’m hopeful that everything will fall into line before too long, but with 4-8 week timelines for loan approval and only 12 weeks to go before school starts, I could run out of time to secure a loan and consequently a UK student visa if my loan applications hit any snags.