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’re 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 pure 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?
This was a lot of extraneous verbiage to read before you got to any question and I nearly gave up. No paragraph break or any relief for the reader. I can’t even skim back and find why you are looking for a school if you already finished the last semester.
Are you saying you are at a CCC looking for a transfer school? Schools admit individuals, not we’s. Some points to consider
–the colleges that give the best need aid are privates that meet 100% of demonstrated need, or publics that do that of course and UC do for low income.
–most colleges don’t give much to transfers otherwise. Merit and best packages are given to entice freshmen who can improve rankings with high test scores. Transers don’t count for that.
–you could check WUE colleges with low tuition and cost of living.
–talk to CCC transfer advisor about which schools are viable. There is a difference in value of gpa given the difficulty of the courses, if you are positioned properly to enter the major as a jr or not. Students who were valuable community members and phi kappa whatever etc can be more attractive.
–I can’t recall the application period but check out Jack Kent Cooke transfer scholarships, but very competitive.