January 28, 2022 marked my one year anniversary of paying off my student loans . Reflecting back on choosing to pay off my student loans leaves me with several take a ways that I want to share with you! In September 2020 I decided to become debt free by utilizing the debt snowball method to pay off all my debt. Before this I had struggled to save and really understand basic financial principles. As a first-generation college student, I received a scholarship to attend undergrad for free, but the scholarship did not cover summers. During the summers I took out student loans to cover costs without paying interest rates or how much I was taking out. By the end of undergrad I had amassed a little under $17K. Fast forward to graduate school I received another scholarship that covered my education. At the time I was a teacher in a new very expensive city and I had missed the cutoff to have my paycheck last me throughout the summer. So, I decided to take out a loan for two summers to ...
Another semester has come to an end, and I am more than excited to have a little rest. If you don’t know I am a second year Higher Education doctoral student. My program is entirely online, and I typically take two courses a semester. This semester I took a Law in Higher Education course and a Qualitative Research course. Figure 1: This is a photo of my YouTube thumbnail for my latest video "How Did My Fall 2021 Semester End?" where I am smiling at the camera with my hand under my chin. My hair is short black and curly, and I am wearing silver hoop earrings. I was the most nervous about my Law in HIED course as I had heard that it may be difficult. It also didn’t help that the professor emailed us early in the course and let the class know that he would be more than a stickler for APA format. This class also required a LOT of reading I’m talking at least a hundred pages a week. Throughout this class I mainly read various cases and wrote APA style summarizations of a given one...