Another college post

In an earlier post I wrote about my extremely expensive college education, and the diminishing returns I have received from it. Part of the problem of my education choice was the fact that I was the very first person in my entire extended family to attend college, so nobody really knew what I needed. My parents dropped me at school with $50 in my pocket. They felt it would get me to my first paycheck; after all, I had a room in the dormitory, and a meal card, and a backpack with pens and notebooks. What else did I need?

Books.

My first paycheck didn't come for 6 weeks, and in that time I needed to come up with $400 worth of books. I called my parents, who said, "We don't have that kind of money! I thought your scholarships covered everything?" Well, they didn't -- the $2400 work "scholarship" allotted to me as a student worker I earned slowly, as I actually worked. I didn't understand this, so between my student work "scholarship" and my books, I was $2800 short for the year. So what was a young person to do? I wandered around at a loss until I finally ended up at a counter where they handed me an application -- for a credit card.

One week later it came in the mail. I went immediately to the bookstore, blew $400 on books and then headed to the mall to buy a winter coat. By the time I went home for Christmas, I had put $660 on the card. By the time I graduated, I owed $6,400. I finally had to negotiate a settlement, which I did, paying just $900 and getting a black mark on my credit.

Lessons I learned from this:

• Only go to college if you can afford it.
• Books cost A LOT. If you're smart, you can utilize some great new programs that weren't available when I went to college, like chegg.com or bookrenter.com -- sites where you can rent books for a fraction of the cost.
• Avoid credit cards. Avoid credit cards. Avoid credit cards AT ALL COSTS. I nearly dropped out of school because I had no money for books again my second year, and sometimes I wish I had (of course, I planned to take my credit card to Europe, so probably it was best I stayed).
• Find a mentor. Rely on them. Heavily. Seriously, I found a mentor my second year, and although he did not help my financial situation much, he did help me graduate. By my second year I was $15,000 in the hole with student loans, so graduating was smarter than dropping out.
• Ask questions! Ask the school what additional expenses you should look for, and don't disregard their response. I could have asked financial aid what to expect and they would have told me; instead I took the 1-year scholarships as a sign that I was going to make it, and when those scholarships went away after the first year I just took out more and more loans to make it through.

Learn from my mistakes; if you're going to go to college, be smart about it.