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How I Paid My Way Through College Without Help From My Parents

Tech Tower, Expensive College Paying for college is hard for the vast majority of people. It’s even harder for some. For me, it was downright grueling. There were plenty of factors that lead to such difficulties, like being an out-of-state student and coming from a family that couldn’t help much financially. However, there were some factors that helped me survive through it, both financially and mentally, like careful spending, the heavy use of coupons, and (the largest of them all) getting married. This is my story.

Since you’ll need to understand exactly why I was an out-of-state student, among other things, I’ll start off with my goals for college from when I was in High School. At the time, I wanted nothing more than to be a video game designer. I still want that to a certain degree, but not as much as I used to. After doing extensive research, I realized that the best way to become a video game designer is to learn how to program games, enter the industry as a programmer, and then prove that I have good ideas as a designer while I’m there. So, I looked into college that could give me a solid programming eduction, and that did research related to video games in one way or another. I was also intrigued by the idea of doing research into virtual reality gaming, so I looked for colleges that did some of that too. After looking around, I came up with only two options that really fit what I wanted; Clemson in South Carolina and Georgia Institute of Technology in, well, Georgia. Clemson was local, GT was definitely not. So, I looked into applying to both, and ran into a snag for Clemson. Clemson requires that you have 3 semesters of foreign language credits. I only had 2. While I felt that it was a stupid reason to exclude me, I was nonetheless excluded. That left Georgia Tech as my only option. Thankfully, I got in without any problems. (more…)