Congratulations! You received your financial aid offer from South Dakota State University. We are happy to help you navigate through the financial aid process.
Step 1. Review your Financial Aid Offer
You can access your financial aid offer on our student portal. To access the portal, log into MyState and click on the Dashboard tab then locate the Financial Aid Self Service item on your Dashboard. Follow the instructions to access Financial Aid Self Service. If you have not previously logged into your MyState account, please go to mystate.sdstate.edu. In the upper right-hand corner click the "Sign In" button and follow the directions under "MyState First Time Login" on the right.
To accept or decline your financial aid offer once you are logged into your Financial Aid Self Service:
- View the upper right side of the page and ensure you see South Dakota State and the 2024-2025 Award Year
- Select View Questions in the red box under “Responses Required” and answer the questions (you can omit this step if you previously answered these questions).
- Select the Award Offer tab
- Use the Take Action dropdown box to accept and decline individual awards
- Select Submit at the bottom of the page
Step 2. Complete your Master Promissory Note, Entrance Loan Counseling and Annual Student Loan Acknowledgement
If you decide to accept a Federal Direct Loan and are a first time borrower, you will need to complete both Entrance Loan Counseling (ELC) and a Master Promissory Note (MPN) at StudentAid.gov before those loans can pay to your billing account. View the videos below for walkthroughs of completing the ELC and the MPN.
Step 3. Make Sure You Are Meeting Minimum Credit Requirements
In order to be eligible for federal loans, you must be enrolled in 6 undergraduate credits as an undergrad or 5 graduate credits as a graduate student. If your credits are a combination of graduate and undergraduate credits, you still need to make sure you are hitting these requirements OR you may be able to have your advisor send the financial aid office an email stating that these credits are counting towards your program.
Additionally, for financial aid purposes you may only re-take a course after passing it one time for it to count towards your financial aid enrollment. Because of this, some courses that have the same course number each semester but have different course topics, could show up as repeats. Please contact our office if you think this is the case for you.
Step 4: Write Thank You Notes for Scholarships
If you are receiving a scholarship that requires a thank you note, you can view that requirement and submit the thank you note in your financial aid self service. Please see the video below for instructions on where to find this.
Step 5: Complete Attendance Confirmation
Attendance confirmation may not be available when you are first accepting your financial aid offer, however it is required before your financial aid will pay to your billing account. Attendance confirmation typically comes out about a month before the semester starts and will show up on your MyState Dashboard. View the video below to see steps to complete the Attendance Confirmation. This is not available year round, you will get an email when this is open.