Eighteen months ago I had a revelation. I realized my life was going nowhere. I was running in circles, giving all my time and energy to temp agencies, which only paid me enough to survive. I was desperate for some sort of direction toward upward mobility, so after a five minuet conversation with a woman working at a gift shop on Venice beach I made a drastic lifestyle change. My wife and were looking at a funny shirt when this woman approached us. She began talking, and it wasn’t long before she told us about her and her boyfriend’s alternative lifestyle. She told us how her boyfriend and her bought a used RV for 1500 dollars, and we’ve been living in it for the past two years. She said they saved forty thousand dollars, and were now saving to buy a house. She showed us that it was a common lifestyle since the recession, and she told us about all of the websites devoted to “urban camping”. The way she spoke about their living situation with such pride almost made me feel silly for not doing it myself earlier. After much more research and debate(my wife was a bigger proponent of the idea), we decide to spend all of our savings on an RV and go back to school. We bought a 1983 Chevy Elderado. At first we were thrilled with our lifestyle change, but now it is just a means to an end. It might not be so bad if it ran and the generator worked. Others within the urban camping community have made a better go of this than us. If you can move it to fill it up with water and propane you can have the amenities of normal people. We bought it because it was the only one with a solar panel(which has helped us do late night cramming for mid terms and finals) but everything else on our RV fell apart. The generator stoped working after a month with it went our A/C. It had a problem with the carburetor the first time we took it to the dump station it overheated and the coolant tank exploded on me. I still have burn scars on my right shoulder and upper chest. A month or so after that the transmission went and it has been parked in the same spot since. Occasionally ever month or so the parking man will give us a ticket for not moving it ( I guess that is like our rent) we then push it with our car, which is destroying our bumper, and makes cops pull us over for no reason, because having an ugly car is a crime in the laws of stereotyping. It is hard our life is very decentralized we have to travel all over town to do basic tasks. We have to travel to the gym to shower , and we go to the library to study during the day and bask in the air conditioning. It has been hard, but we have been thriving in school. We are going into our last semester w/ a 4.0. We will be applying to college and leaving town for some place with a cheaper price of living than Los Angeles soon. What do you guys think the best college we can get into is? What schools have the best financial aid packages? Is anyone else in a similar situation or know someone that is that may want to swap stories?
Are you a California resident? (I saw the Venice part.) I’m transferring this fall and received the most aid from UCLA. My recommendation is to apply for scholarships like crazy, especially any through your current school or the school you want to transfer to. I received almost $4,000 in scholarships from the school I was transfer, and $3,000 from UCLA (outside of the financial aid package they sent me.) the other UC schools I applied to gave me about the same amount minus the additional scholarships, and after that USC gave me the most.
We are California residents. Where did you transfer from? I love the UC’s. How do you like UCLA? We are in the Transfer Alliance Program at UC Berkeley. That is our first choice. Supposedly the blue and gold program will cover tuition, but I am a little worried that San Fransisco has the highest price of living in the country. I’m hopping to not live like this after we transfer to a four year college. Did you get that one through the UC application,College fish, or what? I am also trying to get an idea of what people think of our story. Do you think we have a compelling story to win scholarships?
I transferred from Santa Monica College. I haven’t started school yet, but I’ve been amazed at their dedication to welcoming all students, even transfer students. I was thinking I’d go to Berkeley, but I found them to be much less welcoming/had fewer scholarship opportunities.
My expected financial contribution (from both my family and myself) is $1, so I can give you the basic rundown. For UCLA I was expected to have $9,200 to cover after all of the grants but before my scholarships. After my scholarships-- which I applied to separately from the normal UC application-- I have about $2,000 to cover, but that includes their estimates for living/tuition/health insurance/supplies/transportation/other. For Berkeley I was was only supposed to have $7,200 to pay, but I found out they didn’t include health insurance, and while UCLA over-estimates living costs, Berkeley seemed to under-estimate. I found that I would be able to live off of what UCLA gave me but not what Berkeley gave me. For that, I picked UCLA.
I applied through the UC application. Honestly, I don’t think the essays matter THAT much. Scholarships can be a huge pain to apply for, but I think it is definitely worth it. Each school probably has different scholarships you can apply for, for Berkeley there is a leadership one in February and UCLA has an Alumni scholarship in April. Most scholarships are about the way you write, not necessarily what you write about.
you should also consider private schools that have generous financial aid packages. look outside the state and be ambitious. apply to as many schools as you feel you can without writing crap essays or going crazy trying to climb the paperwork waterfall. I applied to four UCs and five privates and I would have been wise to apply to five or six more if I could have handled the stress and endless mailing of forms. Here is a list: http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/2014/09/15/colleges-and-universities-that-claim-to-meet-full-financial-need
as somebody who also has a less than ideal background, your story is potentially excellent but needs to be reframed a little. don’t explain that you decided to change your life because you wanted money, or describe at considerable length your hardships. I don’t know that these would necessarily be negatives for your application, but you have limited room and they don’t demonstrate the special understanding of your circumstances that will show you have real insight. instead focus on how your profound difficulties have made you a better and more interested person. lots of people are poor, what twist in your life made you poor and interested in improving yourself? lots of people live in ■■■■■■ RVs, what about living in a ■■■■■■ RV made you personally better? what are your ambitions? lots of people are smart and can get 4.0s while being lazy. what makes you not just smart but driven? etc. talk about how the past builds into your future. you want a coherent narrative of your life in which the college you are applying to is a plausible next step.
Thanks. I really appreciate all of your advice. I did not know that about the private school’s generous financial aid packages. I started looking at them. Some of them say 100% of demonstrated need.
I am still a little worried about looking outside the state. With acceptance rates of 1%-18% what are the odds that both my wife and myself could get into the same one? It would be hard to cope if one of us got accepted here and the other one in Ithaca NY or something.
It is also hard to deal with the brevity of these essays. How do you boil down the entire essence of who you are to 500 words?
In talking about my time living in an RV I haven’t even scratched the surface of my experiences. I feel like I also have to explain why I did not go to college out of high school, and am now a reentry student. No one in my family has ever graduated college. Most of my cousins did not graduate high school and are in jail on non-harm crimes like possession of illegal substances and prostitution.
The housing crash was hard on my family and they had to sell their house. After working at the US postal service for a short while, I moved to California thinking it was the easy answer to all our problems.
I started doing stand up comedy even though I had severe social anxiety disorder. In a way it helped with that. I started to make some leeway. The owner of the laugh factory felt bad for me and set me up with the clubs free therapist, who was really there for their working rode comics. Even with the therapy it was still hard putting all of myself on the line every night. All of my confidence rode on whether the crowd liked me, and eventually I had to give it up.
I was lost until I returned to school. Before I returned to school I had to spend a lot of time in Alan-on meetings to understand myself. I did not even realized how much of me was determined by the rest of my family’s substance abuse. It took that community to realize that I was not worthless or defined by others, but I started to derive real confidence in myself when I returned to school. Even though we are living on the streets I am feeling better about myself than ever.
Should I be more brief about being homeless and talk about the rest of my life leading up to that?
For a special understanding of my circumstance could I say living with nothing allowed me to focus on what is important in life? Being conferrable with nothing allowed me to focus on my ideals. I have been trying to build a life plan around my ideals rather than material possessions. I want to teach. Teaching can have a positive domino effect on the world.
This is really hard to put yourself into a box. Does everything really ride on the essay like they say?
What do you mean by,“as somebody who also has a less than ideal background”? I shared mine. I am very curious about your story. When I wrote that I was hopping to find someone to talk to that has similar experiences. It is hard being an outlier in this negative respect.
I would pick a piece and go into detail. Follow the prompts, but the best essay advice I got was instead of telling who I am, SHOW who I am. I wrote about losing my dad to cancer at a young age, but it was the way I SHOWED how it made me who I am that mattered most. I’ve experienced many hardships, but I picked one that showed why I’d make a good student the most.
I agree with onmyway.
What you wrote in that last post is great stuff. It describes your past while framing everything in such a way as to illustrate who you are but remember to focus on the lessons you learned from each experience. Comedy is really putting yourself out there. Maybe you couldn’t handle it at the time, but it helped you get used to the idea of really going all in on something. That sort of thing. You probably have a lot of compelling stories in your life. Pick whichever ones you think are most interesting and zero in on the method of describing yourself, and describing yourself as growing through them, that I keep laying out here.
As far as everything riding on the essay, the minds of admissions officers are inscrutable, so who knows how they weigh other things, but in addition to keeping perfect grades you need to start figuring out letters of recommendation and connecting with teachers who are old hands, asap.
Open up the common app and you’ll see you have more essay room than you think.
It is very unlikely you both would get into the same school. However some of these places will take you to another level of life possibilities. I’m being real with you here. They’re like taking an express elevator a hundred floors up. It’s not just the financial aid. If you visit one of them with the eye for education you’ve developed, you will immediately understand.
My background is like this: difficult early family history with one parent being an in and out of the picture addict, single working mother, dropped out of high school to work at 16, did so for quite some time, then both reconnected with my father and went back to school and discovered I loved math at roughly the same time.
I know when everything didn’t go right when you were growing up, and you find out you can be really good at school later in life, it can be frustrating to think of the wasted opportunities. But don’t think of yourself as having a negative background. Your experiences might be hard on you but they can make you an asset to the students at the school you transfer to. Use the lessons of your shitty past to impart good thinking to other people.
Hey, check your PMs.
The PS, if you’re writing about adversities, should generally be
10% - why life has sucked
30% - How you got through it
60% - why you’re awesome now/what you’re doing now and what you want to do in the future
Look at it as “dilemma vs resolution.”
(Problem/adversity/challenge --> change/growth, etc.)