Round two, I would say. I am once again going through the treacherous process of applying for student loans and figuring out how I am going to make the next three years of my life “affordable,” or so they say. The process of transferring is already more stressful than the first time around. This time, it is easy to say “I know what I want,” to be aware that my current school is not wrapping me up in immature drama, small talk to the same people and a punch list of changes. This idea of knowing exactly what I want does not make the process of acquiring money any easier. Now, the time to search for a school better than the expensive school I already attend is here. Successfully finding it is one thing, successfully affording it is another.

As a child of divorced parents who are unable to help with many expenses, I seem to know too well about the struggles for money. The struggles of money have begun as small challenges, but they have grown. They have grow from small expenses of cars and gifts to spending a life’s savings on education. This seems like an impossible challenge. A challenge that nearly every student falls in misery to face. Our friends choose to go to the lesser college to aid the needs of their financial situation, to then fail to get the education they dream for. Money wraps our minds around the idea of failure. We will never make enough to pay back all of these loans, we won’t take the risk of debt. But there are the few of us who will take the risk.

The risk to make it work. Take out the student loans, apply for an endless amount of scholarships, and plead to the school to give us just a few thousand off of our tuition. But still here we are fading away in our own debt. We find the right person to cosign our loans, but this doesn’t help for we have taken it upon ourselves to pay for college. We are talking about students paying for their own education. The students that have always worked to get where they are, and will continue to work themselves into exhausted success. Then we will come out. We will come out of college hopefully with a degree made up of high grades that will support us. A diploma that we hope to hang on the wall of our “promised” job. They promised, our schools promised that we would be making enough money to truly not be in debt for the rest of our lives. But we fail to get this job. We fail because we are too eager to get the first job that lands on the table rather than waiting for the correct position that will stabilize our lives. You jump into a place with no potential and no stability because they will give you a paycheck the quickest.

We have failed. We have failed because we took a risk once to sign ourselves up for life long debt and not succeeded in making this statement untrue. We have fallen into a game, where we didn’t allow our schools to see us as people but only numbers. We are students paying for our education and we are still seen as a number. We are more than a number, we are people who are pushing through the borders of our scripted lives. We are people who have put our future in the our own hands to create individual success. So; to the colleges that see us as a number, to the colleges who do not recognize our efforts, and to the colleges who do not recognize our true financial situation we are pleading for your assistance. We are pleading for the help of your school to allow us to have an experience of a lifetime, an affordable one.