|
|
|
|
|
|
by generj
3470 days ago
|
|
|
I've been very lucky. I don't want to say everyone can get through college without debt, because that simply isn't true. I also was blessed with a good job and some good timing. Mostly it comes down to my university being so inexpensive. I went to community college first. In community college I found it was really common for people to be doing both full-time school and full-time work. My present university (BYU) also charges very low tuition - almost as cheap as my community college. I've also done some full-time work with part-time summer classes in order to keep my graduation on schedule. I work for a web analytics consultancy, which has allowed my hours to be somewhat flexible. I started at about $10/hour which was enough to meet my expenses at the time (because I was going to community college while living at my parents). Within a year I was making about double that, which was perfect as it coincided with graduating from community college and moving 2000 miles to university (meaning I had to cover my living expenses). This is because the particular type of consulting we do is quite specialized - if I only got two or three real hours of work done in a week out of 20 hours worked the company was still massively ahead at the hourly rates we charge. The work (mostly coding) is different enough from my major (Economics) that I maintain interest in both. My major is also taught by professors who apparently all prefer roughly the same schedule for classes. As a result, semester to semester time shifts in my work schedule are minor. I work in the morning and then do some work in the evening. I won't say everything has been perfect. I don't spend as much time on homework as I ought to. If I procrastinate, a client's work might pop up in the morning before an assignment is due. So I've had to be much more structured in my classwork and often try to get a good chunk of it done on Saturday afternoons. |
|
|
It also speaks very highly of you to acknowledge how lucky you are to be in your situation, in addition to the effort you put in.