Wise Money Choices In College

Wise Money Choices + College Costs = Minimal Stress I cannot believe I have made it this far this quickly. It feels like just yesterday when I was accepting my diploma from Mr. Salvatore, my middle school principal and crying while hugging friends who I knew would be attending a different high school than I. Then, on that hot September day, walking through what I thought must have been the biggest school in the state of New Jersey, I got lost, made new friends, and college was but a dwarfed blip on my radar, far, far away from the center of my mind. Subsequently, in tenth grade, Union High School became smaller and my excitement for graduation was planted by the upperclassmen’s conversations about the upcoming prom and graduation. “I’ll get there,” I thought. Junior year came and the small blip on …show more content…
My focus transferred from primarily social, extracurricular and less-academic participation into shared time between the three things, with academics taking the largest slice of the pie. I saw the cost of attending higher institutions and was baffled. My brother was on his way to college, but I had not been warned about the gargantuan costs of a college education, nor had I bothered to find the information out myself. I buckled down, studied, and took my SATs and ACTs with the intentions of getting the highest possible attainable score in order to get the most amount of scholarship money from colleges. Entering senior year made college hit me smack in the face and so did the realization of the misconception that most colleges would pay for the cost of attendance is not true. I had to find ways to get money and how to manage it. The first step was to find some. So I have taken to resources such as Cappex, Fastweb, my school’s guidance office and random scholarship searches on Google. That tiny blip on the radar representing college has become a full force reminder every day I wake up and when I come home from school