<p>I agree, don’t let little things stand in your way. When my future husband and I moved halfway across country for his grad school, we didn’t have an apartment lined up, and I didn’t have a job. We camped in our tent in a state campground for a couple weeks until we had an apartment while he went to grad student orientation and I set up a bank account, went on job interviews, etc during the day. Things worked out fine. You can do this! It is much easier to move with fewer plans set now–before you have kids, pets, loans, and a mortgage. </p>
<p>Cameraphone, I have messaged you with a strong lead. Please check it out.</p>
<p>OP-we are all cheering for you! You have a bunch of complete strangers that believe you can do this! Several are researching options and giving them to you. Please, please don’t let our faith in you be crushed by very temporary obstacles. If you can do this, you will gain confidence that will get you over any future obstacles you encounter in life.</p>
<p>And what a great story you will get to tell your classmates about this crazy group of strangers that pushed you way out of your comfort zone to get you to attend college!</p>
<p>While nothing is official, I’ve already begun setting up and printing out deferred enrollment paperwork to be turned in to the university office of admissions, just so it’s ready to go by Friday if I absolutely fail to get anything going. I had about three people PM me resources for people still looking for roommates for the fall and when I called each of them, each offer was already taken. I scoured the area’s apartments online and called each apartment complex that I could find, and most of them are either at 99 or 100% capacity, reportedly. Those that are almost full are “technically already full,” as some of them put it, but they’re waiting on guarantor paperwork to get turned in.</p>
<p>I know it seems lazy to not go in person, but I don’t live in Lubbock and it saves a lot of time to either call and ask on the phone or check online.</p>
<p>I feel like this would be easier if I actually had time to research living complexes since I have almost no clue what I’m doing or even how to look for apartments. Obviously go and look, but I don’t even know what a guarantor agreement is. </p>
<p>A guarantor agreement is a legal document which states that if the person living in the apartment (the tenant) fails to pay their rent, the guarantor will pay it and is the person legally liable for the rent, damages to the property, etc.</p>
<p>I’m still seeing Craiglist rooms being advertised every day. Unless all of the ones that don’t specify female-only are being snapped up the instant they are posted, I find it hard to believe that all of them are non-starters. One of the ones posted today looked like it could work, although it had very little information. </p>
<p>After some careful (hasty) decision-making, I’ve quite honestly deemed that I don’t think I’m mature enough to do this. I’m withdrawing while I still have a chance.</p>
<p>I’m sorry to hear this since you had such a great offer from them. What will you do now? Are there other schools closer to home where you could pursue your math degree? What if there would have been spots opening up in a dorm there? Can you defer your acceptance for a year at TT so you don’t lose the full tuition scholarship?<br>
You worked hard in CC and got good grades. You have proven that you can succeed in college.</p>
<p>If you defer enrollment, can you put yourself on the wait list for the dorm now?</p>
<p>I think you can defer up to 3 semesters at TT, call and talk to someone. If you’re not sure if another school will give you an offer like this, it’d be a shame to lose out on this.</p>
<p>I haven’t submitted the paperwork to withdraw, but I have to do it before 4 PM today in order to not pay $900 for late withdrawal next week.</p>
<p>I talked to admissions and I was told you can only defer only until the spring semester. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Probably get professional and medical help for anxiety and depression since I will admit is why I didn’t make much of a serious effort here at the end to find alternative housing.</p>
<p>I know that my Proven Achiever’s Scholarship will hold until the spring or next fall if I reapply. The other smaller scholarships, I didn’t get an answer back on whether or not they’d hold. I would’ve held out on a dorm, but I don’t know if I’d have the ability to do so if I got an apartment since I’d be locked into a lease for a year. Definitely I could get on the waitlist for the dorm now, since TTU does offer a spring-only contract for dorms.</p>
<p>But as a transfer, I’m not sure that enrolling in the spring is a good idea because there’s a fall-only class, Intro to Proofs, that would lock me out of all classes during the spring. So the only other option is to wait until next summer to redo all the classes I missed out on.</p>
<p>I can pursue my math degree elsewhere, sure. But again, I’m still not settled on what I want to study. Taking a year off to figure that out won’t help because I’ll still find myself at the same crossroads like I have today. However, if I take a year off, I’d probably try to find another school that might have a better offer. I quite literally got squeezed into Texas Tech at the last minute because they had the automatic-merit scholarship for transfers and it paid for quite a lot, whereas I turned in my FAFSA very late and thus got no scholarship money from the other universities that I applied to.</p>
<p>I keep trying to talk myself out of my decision to fax off the withdrawal forms, but I honestly feel like I’m not mature enough to handle a house/apartment on my own. I feel like living in a dorm would’ve solved this problem, but I don’t know… Maybe I need another year to do some growing up, but I’ve been told taking a year off in the midst of your education makes in incredibly unlikely you’ll ever go back…</p>
<p>We can all dream, I suppose…</p>
<p>Camera- fill your car with gas and go. You are not talking about living in SF or Hong Kong or London- some of the most expensive cities in the world. You need to find a Motel 6 for a couple of days while you see for yourself that some of these apartment shares are quite doable and not scary and won’t involve any more maturity than you have right at this very moment. You can find cheap interim housing which is not a homeless shelter… and from there, you can show up at the University’s housing office just when a student withdraws (today at 3:59 pm) and get his room.</p>
<p>The energy you are spending NOT moving forward and getting an education could be spent on learning, studying, growing. You are spinning in place to find reasons not to go now, not to go for Spring semester, etc.</p>
<p>Go. Trust me. You can find a cheap motel. From there you will find an affordable room or manage to talk your way into the dorms. And then you’re done with this internal conversation. Stop telling yourself that “I’ve been told that taking a year off” and all the other “I’ve been tolds”. You deserve this. You are a Proven Achiever and you can do this.</p>
<p>Grab a granola bar, throw a towel and an alarm clock in the back seat and go. The stars will never line up so that it’s perfect. Never. It will never be better than it is today. There will always be something that’s suboptimal or that needs fixing or a class you can’t take on time or a scholarship that didn’t come through.</p>
<p>So right now- go. You’ve made it this far…</p>
<p>@cameraphone, listen to blossom.</p>
<p>A friend of a friend is in his 40s. He is still living with his mother. He is a very nice guy, but his family is dysfunctional and his brothers and mother treat him very badly. Our mutual friend made the move from the city in NJ where he lives to Brunswick Maine a few years ago, and is extremely happy. He loves it, has made new friends, gets to do a lot on a small budget, etc. He has an extra bedroom and has offered the 40s guy a room to stay in indefinitely if he wants to come up and test the area out. The 40s guy arranged a leave of absence from his long term employer. My friend offered to bring him up in late May, when he was in the area. 40s guy couldn’t get it together. I was just down in the NYC area, and offered to drive to NJ and pick him and his stuff up and bring him here. He said yes. Then he said he wasn’t sure, and he had to finish going through his stuff. He had a headache. Then he called the morning we were supposed to leave and said he wasn’t ready. He was supposed to take the bus up last weekend: couldn’t make it. He bought a ticket for a couple days ago, and called that he had missed the bus. Now we are waiting to see if he comes this weekend. Meanwhile, his leave of absence is ticking away. He has wasted 4 of the 6 months. He is single, in his 40s, and lives with his abusive family.</p>
<p>Get the picture??? Your family isn’t abusive, that’s not my point. </p>
<p>Take this opportunity. Just GO. It will all work out. </p>
<p>Camera- you’ve shown enormous maturity by getting as far as you have without a family to nudge you along. you may think that your classmates are all wise and experienced and know what they are doing but guess what- they are teenagers. Some of them have never been away from home. Some of them couldn’t find their way to the library without a parent showing them how.</p>
<p>You are going to be fine. You are going to find a Dean or an Adviser or a sympathetic person in the Housing office who hears your story and wants to pull some strings for you. You are going to find an administrative assistant to a department chair who is impressed by your guts and your resilience who is going to find you space in a class which is already over-enrolled (since a few students are likely to drop the class after the first week.) Someone in the cafeteria is going to notice that you are only eating an apple for lunch, and will talk to the manager to get you some hours cutting carrots for the salad bar twice a week (a little extra cash which won’t interfere with your schoolwork plus two free meals during your shift).</p>
<p>It will happen. You have all the maturity and wisdom you need to take this step. There will be kind adults at college who will want to help you, just like all the adults who are posting here. You’ve done an incredible thing and now you are going to get in the car and go and nothing can hold you back.</p>
<p>A long time ago I did something nice for a kid who sounds a lot like you. It was a favor- I didn’t have to stick my neck out, and it didn’t cost me a dime. But it was a nice thing to do for a kid who had so much going for him but needed a lucky break. He called me years later to tell me that he makes a point of trying to pay it forward, now that he’s a successful adult, out of gratitude for what I did for him. I was quite literally in tears hearing what this young man routinely does for strangers just out of a sense of obligation for a favor I did for him a long time ago.</p>
<p>I don’t tell you this to brag about how great I am (believe me, it wasn’t such a big deal at the time…) But you will find that this university and the town are filled with people who have been given a hand at a vulnerable point in their lives and they’ve never forgotten it. So they want to pay it forward. They make a practice of seeing someone at an inflection point of their lives- who don’t have a family propelling them forward or encouraging them to dream big… and they jump in to help.</p>
<p>Go. Ten years from now you will be the experienced adult who is helping out other people out of the gratitude you feel. Don’t talk yourself into staying home, only to discover in January that you can’t get your courses scheduled, only to discover that you can’t manage your summer schedule, only to discover by next August that the university is over-enrolled. Your time is right now.</p>
<p>I think I have an idea of what I can do. I just did some analysis of my degree plan as well as consulted the mathematics department.</p>
<p>I do have the option to defer enrollment until Spring 2015. According to their class rotation schedule, I do have the option to take Intro to Proofs in the spring and then take two classes in the summer of 2015. If I do that, I’ll still be able to graduate on-time. This gives me some more time to think about my decision, but I’d have to take a summer class in a senior-level course which sounds interesting…</p>
<p>In the meantime, I could work to earn some more money to help cover any additional class costs. And perhaps I will have a better idea of what’s going to happen. Seems like a hastily-made decision and it’s a tight-fit schedule that doesn’t allow for much error, but it seems a little more enticing.</p>
<p>How are you doing? Did your your deferral until spring work out? Are you going to be working in the meantime?
Could you maybe work as a math tutor also?
I hope you can get a spot on campus now with more time.</p>
<p>Well @mommdc </p>
<p>Here’s the skinny on what happened…</p>
<p>I dropped all my classes that Friday afternoon and withdrew. I regretted it all weekend. That following Monday, I called around and begged and pleaded to be reinstated. After explaining my case, I did manage to get reinstated, believe that or not.</p>
<p>I felt that it was a miracle that I managed to get reinstated, but I lost all of my classes that I’d registered for–and I still didn’t have any housing! I was seriously considering just commuting there every MWF. I contacted University Student Housing one last, fateful time. They told me, “Maybe if you come here and speak to an advisor, we’ll probably have some sympathy for you to find somewhere to put you.”</p>
<p>I thought it was the 2nd miracle to happen in a day, so I drove down to Lubbock and walked into University Student Housing. They turned me away immediately. So I felt like such a long drive away from home, especially since I have no experience driving those long distances and almost died in a serious near-car accident, was all for nothing. I was only in town for about 15 minutes, and I was seriously contemplating just heading back home. But I called one of my friends who was also a transfer and thought I would at least hang out with her for the day before I went back.</p>
<p>Well she got the VERY last spot for a girl in the brand new apartments ON-campus. She suggested that I try there also since they are actually managed semi-separately from the dorms and there might be some disjointedness. I went and talked to them and, LO AND BEHOLD, they had ONE cancellation! Reportedly, the cancellation was because the dude was rushing and his fraternity he wanted to get into rejected him, so he was dropping out. I quickly snatched that cancelled spot up before anyone else had a chance to. But I could not move in for a few days since they had to get that guy to move out. Well, I didn’t attempt to register for classes until it was too late–Registration was still possible, but all my classes that I wanted to get into were totally full with miles-long waiting lists. The way Texas Tech’s system works, you cannot put yourself on a waiting list that that’s already full. So despite getting housing, I hit that registration roadblock.</p>
<p>So here I am several days later, eating Chick-Fil-A and typing this. I’ve honestly decided to go to another university this fall because I let myself get discouraged by my family. As such, I switched my major to engineering because what else? I could still do math, but again, the math program at this other university is kind of miniscule and a back-burner type of deal. Today was THE last day to register for this other university, and I panicked and took that shot. I have a couple of days to decide ultimately whether or not I’ll stick with it, since the last day to drop without creating an academic record is not for a few days. If I drop without creating an academic record, I don’t exactly forfeit those really nice scholarships from Texas Tech and have another shot at going to Texas Tech in the spring. But I feel like it’s high time I pick something, stick with it, and never look back. It’s kind of hard though… Today in one of my classes, I sat behind a dude wearing a Texas Tech shirt despite us not being at Texas Tech… It kind of made my heart ache for something that just doesn’t seem like it’s meant to be…</p>
<p>Wow, what a mess. At first your classes were set but no housing, now the other way around.
I thought you were going to defer to try and give yourself more time and find housing.
I wish you had contacted your friend about housing or just went down there like people suggested before withdrawing.
Anyways I wish you the best of luck. Work hard at your local university and maybe you can transfer later if you still want to. There are more than one way to get to your goal.</p>
<p>^ I’m afraid registering at his local university would make him forfeit his scholarships though.
What a mess indeed.
Before you take a * leave of absence* (that’s the “administrative” proper term, different from other terms and with more advantages to you than <em>withdrawing</em>, which would cause you to lose your scholarship) go talk to people, in person.</p>
<p>You’re supposed to be at Texas Tech. You KNOW that.
Do what you have to.</p>
<p>You have housing. Now, you need to find classes.
Do you have an adviser at Texas Tech? If so, go to his/her office hours or make an appointment. Explain your predicament.
Send a nice email to all professors from math classes at the level you can take and ask whether there might be able to add a person. Give your story so that they understand (first gen, already lots of math credits, parents discouraging you from going, no housing, no tires for car… then overcoming all these obstacles, getting housing, and being stuck because you can’t take classes at your level.) That will be more compelling than just saying “I’d like to take your class”. Now, you can’t just include the classes you’d like to take. You have to include ALL the possible classes at your level, either counting toward the major or completing it.</p>
<p>In addition, Texas Tech has lots of gen ed requirements: which ones can you get out of the way? </p>
<p>Or, if you already have all gen eds covered (and DO check each of them), can you get started on a minor such as Applied math or Computer Science, which would complement Math major really well? Why not take a class in education, if you were to want to teach math (there’s a huge shortage of math teachers, and if on top of it you were able to have a bilingual education certificate to teach math in Spanish you’d probably be recruited like crazy even before graduation).</p>
<p>I agree with MYO, there HAVE to be SOME classes you can take. They may not be what you wanted for your first semester, but wouldn’t they be worth sticking through for the sake of staying at a school you know you want to be at? Think about it. Talk to professors, advisers, friends. It’s hard for me to believe that a decent-sized school won’t have openings in 3 or 4 classes you could still slip into. </p>