Money and College

Going into college I had a scholarship that provided $3000 a semester but required a 3.0 GPA to keep it. My first semester I pulled a 2.98 GPA (mostly because of Dr. Szabo’s Critical Approaches to Literature class and the fact that I am an antifeminist—New Chauvanist—and rebel against the standard academic approach to literary interpretation, preferring to read what the author wrote rather than projecting some other interpretation on the work. . . and because I hadn’t thought I through far enough to articulate my idea of literary interpretation in a solidly defensible manner)

That was okay, I only needed slightly more than a 3.0 to keep the scholarship and that would be fairly easy, right? . . . Wrong. I made the mistake of taking Sarah Fairfield’s Sociology class (when I couldn’t get into Dr. Frey’s) Don’t get me wrong, theoretically, I would have loved Sociology, it is just the kind of study that I love to do and I would have loved to learn how societies work, and how all the little things come together to make society. But Fairfield did a really bad job of teaching the class, didn’t do a good job of engaging with the material and didn’t tie anything together (which I thought was pretty much the entire point of Sociology. . . ) and on top of that she graded the papers and journal entries really hard, which made it really hard to actually do well without engaging with anything.

In the end I made it through that class with a C- and happy with a passing grade. . . well the put my career GPA at 2.9. . . just shy of the 3.0 I needed to keep that $3000 a semester. My parents were far from pleased and the pressure was on, I needed to make a lot more money and I was going to be stuck with a lot more debt. My financial aid packet came from Geneva today and instead of the $3000 scholarship for academic excellence, I had a $2700 grant each semester based on financial need, making it only $600 I have to make up rather than $6000. I was much relieved and my parents are no longer quite so livid about how badly I did and how under motivated I was to do well in Sociology.

All in all, I am quite happy.

Now I just need that job so I can have some money. . .