Congratulations - We Made the Boston Globe
Today's Boston Globe has a special section on financing your education, and in one article is a blurb about the blog. So, we've made the news!
The article, entitled “Aid offices shed cold image for games, personal approach” reads in part like this:
Students at MIT get their financial aid questions answered on the Internet -- sometimes within seconds. Financial aid director Daniel T. Barkowitz blended technology with his personal touch when he started a popular blog in October to answer questions, dispel rumors, and correct misinformation. He writes from his office as well as from home in his pajamas, lacing his responses with humor and even sharing his poetry and brain teasers.
''How do you try to make something that's so serious, so stuffy, so buttoned-up into something that's more user-friendly and try to alleviate some of the stress?" said Barkowitz, whom students have nicknamed the ''Money Man."
To spice up his columns on financial aid, Barkowitz peppers his writing with pop cultural references, such as ''Data, More Data and Even More Brent Spiner," a reference to the actor who portrays the Star Trek character. More than half of MIT's 4,100 undergraduates receive financial aid from the university.
Dave McClain filed the required financial aid forms online after his daughter applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was overwhelmed at first. ''It's scary the amount of information they need," said McClain, who lives in Lowell, Mich. ''We thought we could do it in 10 minutes but realized we needed our W-2, bank statements, tax returns, how many miles were on our cars. . . ."
He found the MIT financial aid director's blog comforting when he couldn't understand why the university wanted noncustodial parent tax information; he and his wife have been married for 25 years. Within two hours, Barkowitz cleared up the error.
The entire article can be found here, and the section here.