A key requirement to receive any form of federal student assistance is that you have established eligibility by starting your course work at the time the Office of Student Financial Assistance authorizes any assistance to be disbursed on your behalf. As noted above, one eligibility requirement for a federal student loan is that a student must be at least halftime. Before a federal student loan can be authorized for disbursement, however, actual course work will need to have already begun in enough courses so that the student can be counted as halftime.
For example, an undergraduate student is enrolled in a 3-credit hour course that begins and ends in June and a 3-credit hour course that begins the first week of July and ends in early August. While the Office of Student Financial Assistance is allowed to offer a student loan premised on the fact that the student meets the halftime minimum loan requirement of 6 summer credit hours, the office is not allowed to authorize the disbursement of the loan until the student has begun course work in July on her/his second summer course.