Feeling stuck and in debt

Feeling stuck and in debt.

This is America, where you’re taught to work and work hard. If you work hard then you will succeed. We spent twelve years in repetitive school learning the same old lesson over and over again. All the while we are told we have these “standards” that we are supposed to meet. Once this is over we are told to go to college!

College is where we can choose a degree to help us become who we want to be. It is the certificate that states “hey look I have the credentials to prove myself. Now I think we can all agree that academic education doesn’t decipher how smart you are and that many people can be just more intelligent if not more than someone with a college education.

I don’t think the degree is a measurement of intelligence it’s more of like a certificate that says, “You actually stuck to your guns and you earned something”. It is exciting and it is an extreme boost of confidence to say that I earned a degree.

I have a bachelor’s degree in communications. A new graduate I am. August of 2014 is when I earned my degree officially. It took me a total of four and half years to earn this expensive piece of paper.

I first went to college when I was twenty one, with a three year old child and turns out I was pregnant with my youngest child. I was enrolled at a local community college CWI and went full time. It was in January of 2010 that I first began.  My time spent at the community college was lots of fun. I met a bunch of new inspiring people, quite enjoyed my professors except for one. He was a philosophy professor the course I had him for was   “survey of world’s religion”. He reminded me of Nigel from wild Thornberry’s. He had this very strong accent and bright orange hair. His similarities to Nigel were not what deciphered my strong dislike for him. It was his pompous attitude. I swear he felt that he was too good to be teaching at a community college and it was the way he graded. The first of two courses I dropped.

Anyways college was real struggle for me. I had given birth to my youngest child on July 18^th 2010 with only ten days left of my second semester. Luckily I had some very nice understanding teachers who allowed me to be dismissed and come in and finish my finals. I had a five week break and then bam the next semester started. I was a nursing mother so I had to arrange time to pump breast milk in between classes. Oh what fun that was. This leads to my other class I dropped and actually this one was the first class I dropped and it was math. Ugh I was late every day to that class because I had to pump. Luckily it was an excused tardiness, but it made me miss the begging lessons. Everyone knows when you don’t know what’s going on in math it becomes really hard to catch up. Either way point is I dropped that course.  Time went on and both my children grew. Once I finished two years at CWI it became time to transfer.

I decided to transfer to an online school. Ashford University.  Online schooling was easy, but oh boy did it require a lot of writing. It was ridiculous how much writing was required. It was nice because it was one class every five weeks instead of four classes in twelve weeks. This was also a good experience and plus it allowed for me to stay home with the kids and not have to worry about day care. Again kids continued to grow and time went on.

I began working the last year I was enrolled in school. In October 2013 I got a position as a support staff for developmentally disabled. It was a fun job, but could become very draining quite fast. It was like a constant tug of war. There’s only so much you can do with the title I had. I couldn’t change anything, and was constantly dealing with something. This job was nice though because it too allowed me to stay focused on school and not be too distracted. I recently transitioned jobs and am now an activities assistant in a nursing home. This job too is easy and nice, but I’m still in poverty income levels as well as it’s just not my personality.

I finally graduated in August of 2014. I have a great GPA; I made my parents and myself proud but now what? What do I do? And where do I go? I apply at jobs constantly and am still stuck in poverty and worse debt. I owe $60,000.00 for my piece of paper. First payment is actually next month. Estimated 500.00 a month and I got it lowered to 187.00. This is crazy. I gambled that much money for a hope to get a good job? is that what I did, no turning back its too late I already rolled the dice.