The Importance Of My Life

1012 Words3 Pages
When I graduated high school, my brother gave me a card that read, “Just when the caterpillar thought life was over, it became a butterfly.” At the time, I had gone through my fair share of hardships through typical friendship fallouts, family illness, and more; however, that quote carried me through my first year at the University of Northern Iowa. This desire to go to college was cemented in my mind from a very young age, and when I started applying to schools, I can’t describe how excited I was. I couldn’t apply to hundreds of places, like I thought I would, because of the application fees that I was unaware of; however, I still got to apply to private schools that I dreamed of after watching Rory Gilmore go to Yale. While I didn’t apply to Yale, I was overjoyed to get accepted to Drake University, and upon a campus tour, I was in love. It wasn’t until my “financial aid” package came in that I realized my dream to go there was just that: a dream. I was putting myself through school, and if I went to Drake, I would have around $20,000 in loans annually. I tried to tell myself (and my parents) that the scholarships…show more content…
I had taken out the max in each loan, and my parents had to cosign a loan for me. This weighed on me every day, making me feel like there was a literal ton of expectation on my shoulders. I had work study, and I worked as much as I could, but by the time January rolled around, I was slowly starting to look at community colleges I could transfer to. I have had a job since I was fourteen years old, and work ethic has been pumped into my system by my dad, but I was raised to buy what you had to in order to get by, so I figured community college would fix the financial issue for at least a year. While I have learned that loans are a part of college, and adulthood in general, at the time, I was terrified by the number of zeros I owed to some invisible
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