Part 5: Conclusion
A refresher: - Everything was sucking. Applied to Semester at Sea (SAS) program, a floating classroom that visits 13 ports.
- Exhausted all emergency funds, sold Modern Industry to make SAS down-payment.
- Before funds could transfer, ship got overbooked for first time in 40 years.
- Enrolled in more expensive spring semester with $10K grant SAS offered due to overbooking.
- I enrolled for a fall semester at my university to remain eligible for SAS, even though I’d finished my degree/minor in 3 years.
- Scrounged quarters out of my car to pay for passport.
- Lost all my financial aid paperwork during a file backup, 3 days before deadline. Worked day and night.
- Slagar from these forums delivered 40 pages of applications -- in person -- by the deadline.
- Aid package fell way short of the required amount; it was over.
There’s another scene in my book that I come back to often. The main character is preparing for a suicide run against a city-fortress and his friends try to stop him:
“Not hard, Morgan! It’s impossible.” Claire’s voice was high, desperate. “You’re damn near invincible out here on the plains where it’s all about you. You can move with freedom out here. But if you get inside that city it’s going to be close quarters. All it’ll come down to is how much abuse your machine can take walking down an alley. All the willpower in the world won’t hold your armor on.”
“They’ll tear you apart, Morgan.”
And he replies simply,
“Then I’ll be torn apart.”
It’s resignation and defiance; he knows he can’t win, but he goes anyway. So it was for me.
Despite having approximately zero hope, the Monday after the aid was posted, I called SAS and told them I knew they sometimes put people on a waiting list for more aid, since other students would inevitably drop. As we were discussing the current aid and costs, the aid officer asked where I was coming up with my current estimate. I explained and she checked my records.
“The $10,000 grant was never posted,” she told me. Despite emails in which another rep had rolled my admission to the spring along with the grant, they’d never credited it. She told me that they did not have the funding to give me all of my aid and the grant (it could only be one or the other), because it wouldn’t be fair to other students. I had heard this before and understood; however, they had promised me this money with explicit written documents stating that it was compatible with financial aid. It was offered because of their overbooking fiasco, after all, and rich students could have received the grant too.
My hopes went from zero to about -50. The bill had actually gone UP to approximately $20,000.
Not sure why, but, I next visited my home school’s study abroad office. First they told me that I must attend a “first steps” meeting to even talk to a counselor. I tried to explain that I was already enrolled in a program but was told the meeting was required. So I went to the pointless meeting later that day. I came back the next day and again asked to talk to someone. They asked what program I needed to talk about, and told them SAS. They responded that SAS isn’t an approved program and I couldn’t talk to a counselor. I patiently explained that I’d already talked to the financial aid office in the spring, and was told that when I had a final cost estimate of my trip, that the study abroad office could write it up and they’d figure out an aid package based on what I’d normally be given for a spring semester. The office worker hesitated but finally went to get someone.
The next aid officer told me that, despite what the financial aid office had said, because SAS wasn’t approved by my university, I could not transfer any kind of aid. I would have to have my courses approved by the dean of my college, who had never approved coursework before. (Don’t forget, I pulled a Kirk and had already finished my 4 years in 3; I didn’t need any kind of course credit.) She sarcastically told me “good luck” and I left. I had dealt with enough administrative people at my school to know talking to them was futile.
Now, I had done my homework on this. I already knew I wasn’t eligible for any study abroad scholarships my school provided, and couldn’t transfer state aid to an unapproved program. But no one had said that the program/courses needed to be approved to even transfer the federal grants/loans; and in fact this is totally illogical, because these should by definition be spendable in any state. Once again, my school had told me a half-truth despite my questions, and they were calling the shots for my life.
I called my mother to inform her and her boyfriend that, while I appreciated their offer, the cost had actually grown by another $10-15,000 and was now
truly impossible. I’d paid down $7k/year in high school; I’d paid off $7k in a semester; I’d paid off $7k in two months. But this? $20,000? I once again said words that I don’t believe in…
“I give up,” I told her. This was my mother, a person I had forcibly separated from my household a few years earlier, and whose help I had done without. “Even I can’t do this.”
We began to discuss unpleasant options for where I could live in the spring. It was over. The one thing I had ever truly wanted, and that I had already banked hard on and called in incredible favors for, and that had kept me afloat during some stormy moments, was impossible.
Yet, I still chatted with a friend who lives in Chicago and planned a trip to begin applying for visas in person. Applying in-person would save me at least $300, or closer to $500 compared to using the quick-and-easy service that SAS recommended. It was much trickier to do multiple visas this way, because you had to precisely fill out the many forms for each location; this required making a number of phone calls and navigating poorly laid out and contradictory websites (check out the Chinese consulate in Chicago’s website if you want a headache). Even so, I was determined to save money this way. If I drove 3 hours home, I could then take cheap train rides into the city to drop off and pick up the necessary materials, which was even cheaper than the specific types of shipping that were required, as well as faster; I could even finish getting a late start from waiting on aid. My friend and I were scheduled to make our first trip on a Friday.
But wait, you ask, why was I doing this even knowing I wasn’t going on the trip? Was I delusional?
The honest answer is that I do not know why I continued planning; only that I did. And I sent SAS emails that were even more epic than this daily-grind story. Told them that their program was inaccessible to people like me, that outside study abroad scholarships weren’t applicable, that it’s hard to get anywhere when you aren’t a minority, that I felt let down by their promises to provide good funding to students with enough need and merit. I asked how much poorer you had to be to get need-based aid if I had only received $1000 of the $10,000 possible. I explained that I’d already explored outside loans for my home school and that I could not handle any more debt, nor find a cosigner in my poor family to sign for it. Told them that their program, no matter how you sliced it, required a massive parental investment and a family capable of supporting that.
On the Friday of the drop deadline, I drove to my permanent home near Chicago to begin securing visas. That afternoon, I sat down to find the page to drop out of the program on the SAS website. I sent my financial aid officer a final email asking where the drop page was, and mentioned she had not answered my previous emails regarding the inaccessibility of the program and my desire to withdraw.
She called me then, an hour before the drop deadline. She thanked me for my emails and was very empathetic. She told me that she could give me the $10k grant, and that I could drop to an economy cabin despite the grant’s stipulations; this shaved another several thousand off the costs, although I knew from pictures that even the tiny
“Silent Steel” build I began building in the spring for this trip would have to be scrapped. She said she was also able to offer me a portion of the original aid package: a few “prestigious” alumni scholarships, as well as the work study they’d offered me. “We really need a good IT tech onboard the ship,” she told me, “and you were one of the most qualified applicants we’ve received.”
In sum, with the grant, the aid, the work study, and a switch to the cheapo economy cabin, the cost was now around $7,000. She gave me a two-week extension on the drop deadline. I thanked her sincerely for doing her best on the offer and said I’d investigate my options.
I hung up that phone in a trance; walked out to the kitchen where my grandmother was sitting. Sat down, stared straight ahead. “Are you ok?” my grandmother asked. At first I put my hand up and mumbled, “thinking…” Then I began to smile uncontrollably, slowly turned toward her, and explained the situation. To anyone else of my means, $7,000 in two weeks was still fully impossible, and I’d be nuts to think I could do that. But after all I’d been through with this trip and in my preceding life, it was damn close… It was within striking distance… Almost feel the salt of the sea air sticking to my skin, you know? I thought,
I can DO this.
This story is not of some wishy-washy miracle where the lighting gets soft and warm Christmas music plays at the end; I sat there and began writing down every source of money and expenses I could think of in nitty-gritty detail. After factoring rent, the GRE exam, grad school application costs, a smidge for food and gas, I could churn up $1500 almost immediately out of pocket. How? Because, after finally losing my girlfriend and moving into an apartment this year like I had wanted to do with her for several years, I’d taken what would naturally be a $3-4000 housing balance for the year (assuming my school had never pulled any fast ones on me) and turned it into a $2500
surplus. With extra saved from my 80-hour workweeks over the summer, and by doubling my work hours during the semester, and by living far from campus and taking the bus, and by only using one roll of paper towel and toilet paper and one bottle of Windex and only spending money to eat out with friends here and there, and going to the library to rent movies, and ordering books online, and so on and so forth, I had lived rock-bottom cheap. My paychecks could protect that nest egg and eventually add to it, month by month.
Next, I asked my grandmother: can you stall off the contractors and give me an advance using your homeowner’s insurance? Our home had (for the millionth time) been flooded at the end of the summer, destroying the basement (it still reeks of formaldehyde). She was sitting on a few thousand worth of insurance money and the contractor was being easy with her because she was an old lady. The deal was, we could pay her back with a spring tax return and get the house fixed up then. “Sure,” she said. “I can hold them off for a few months. It’s too cold anyway.”
The total bill was now around $4500. I asked my grandmother, what would you think if I took my mother up on that offer for $4000? She didn’t even flinch and said, “take it!” In her view, I’d never received any support from my mother. And, in fact, the situation was much more dire than would be appropriate for me to describe here (out of respect to the privacy of others, I could personally care less). Suffice to say, a great deal of damage had been done to my education by decisions on that end of the family, never mind family quarrels that had destroyed what little family I ever had. What it ultimately came down to for me, though, was that this was something I really wanted -- not something I needed. Hopefully you know what I mean by that.
So, I called and explained the situation to my mother and our old family friend who she was living with, and told them I’d accept the offer. I spent the next two weeks examining costs, double checking estimates, considering second jobs, coordinating paychecks and insurance money and bank transfers, and so on. On the extension drop deadline, I called to tell my aid officer that I’d figured out how to pay for the remaining $7,000 and that I’d signed up for a 6-month payment plan (which would continue until April of the next year). The truth was I was still approximately $500 short in my estimates, but I figured… By the time my account runs dry, they’ll have to fly me off the ship on a helicopter. I could just pay off what was left after returning home.
And that was it. “I’m going to sail with you this spring,” I said. And that, my friends and enthusiast buddies, is the story of how one guy secured the journey of a lifetime. You can imagine that every single day of that trip, I will wake up and spring out of bed with a purpose and with gratitude: for the help of people like Slagar and my aid officer, for my mother and her friend, for my grandmother… and gratitude for that feeling deep down that said this was right; the voice that, to quote my book, made me “feel you can do what you know you can’t.” As with all my life, I am grateful “for the foe who had given me the chance to make myself what I knew I should have been, even if the way was far harder.”
There will be those few times in life when you have the opportunity to define yourself; when you are faced with the unfairness of the world, or the apathy of those around you, and the only way you can pull through is by culling together all the worst of your life. But seek the good people who will help, and absorb the obstructers like a sea absorbs the rain. Most of all, when you are against your own greatest foe -- the little voice inside that tells you to quit, that it was all just a nice dream -- dig down deeper until you hear the sounds that reside there, the voice that booms back:
DREAMS ARE NOT ENOUGH
