The program I'm applying to requires transcript of records (among other things) in form of a spreadsheet. Following my classmates' suggestion, I pdftotext'ed the preprinted document, preprocessed it and used sed one-liners to fill in 43 courses' grades in less than 5 minutes (including the time to look up for that one-liner). I'm so proud of myself: I saved so much time that otherwise would be wasted on manually inputing the data and managed to use it to watch how otters are S-tier mustelids.
OK I got admitted, middle ranked, but the financial issue remains. Guess I wasted the application fee of €30 for nothing.
This, plus the uncertainty in scholarship/financial support from the local government really gives me second thoughts about postponing my master study until post-covid, even if I get accepted. On the other hand, getting a job working exclusively free software is equally hard, especially when I'm lacking expertise in lower-level computing and relevant theoretical knowledge.