When I was 18, local headlines and social media posts about me all focused on the exact same number: I was accepted into more than 20 colleges and offered over $1 million in combined scholarship funding.
I’m sure that to people reading the news, that seven-figure total sounded like a lottery win. What the headlines missed was the invisible labor it took to get there.
People saw the final funding amount. They didn’t see the unpaid late-night hours I worked every single night, completely on my own, just to afford my future.
No manual, no guidance counselor, and no road map
I grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, determined to become the first person in my family to graduate from college. My goal was to study film and television at New York University. Getting accepted was one hurdle, but figuring out how to pay for it was the real wall.
My family did not have extra money for tuition, and my mom had never navigated higher education. When I asked for help at school, my guidance counselor had no answers for an out-of-state dream. On top of that, I was trying to figure this out during the COVID-19 pandemic, isolated at home and staring at confusing college portals, financial aid pages, and scholarship search engines I had never seen before.
Nobody explained how to navigate the Common App, the single online application platform that allows students to apply to hundreds of different colleges at once. Nobody showed me how to find legitimate scholarship databases or how to request application fee waivers, so I wouldn’t go broke just applying. Having internet access gave me a starting point, but it didn’t give me a map. I realized early on that if I didn’t hunt down the answers myself, nobody was going to hand them to me.
Working the late shift at home
High school schedules are already full. My days consisted of seven hours of school followed by homework. After that came my responsibilities at home: since age 10, I had been helping care for my grandmother and my disabled uncle while my mom worked two jobs to pay our bills.
Between classes, schoolwork, and family caretaking, my daily bandwidth was entirely tapped out. But I couldn’t afford to wait for a miracle.
Starting in my junior year and carrying straight through senior year, my second shift began the moment my family went to sleep. From 11 p.m. to 3 a.m., I managed college portals, tracked deadlines on spreadsheets, searched for scholarships, and drafted essay after essay.
The process behind the funding
The hardest part wasn’t keeping track of dates on a spreadsheet. It was learning how to write about myself for an audience while building a strategy from scratch.
Because I was applying mostly out-of-state, I couldn’t rely on local state grants. Instead, I had to secure the maximum federal financial aid I could through the FAFSA, hunt down fee waivers to eliminate costs across more than 20 colleges, scour online databases for independent corporate grants, and apply directly to universities for institutional merit and need-based packages.
I spent hours tailoring my story to different prompts, explaining to review committees who I was, what my life was like at home, and why my experiences mattered. Doing that over and over was exhausting, especially when my 15-hour effort sometimes ended in rejection or, worse, total silence. But because I needed options, I had to brush it off, log back in, and apply to the next opportunity.
The hidden cost
When college admissions became a second job, my life stopped being about learning and growing. It became about performing and surviving. Balancing school, caregiving, and hours of nightly application work left zero room for rest. It triggered chronic stress, sleep deprivation, and the constant fear that I wasn’t doing enough.
I completely missed out on the typical high school experience. While most of my classmates went to football games, hung out on weekends, and enjoyed their senior year milestones, my world looked very different. I had one close friend in high school who was also helping care for her grandmother.
Outside of our shared understanding of what it meant to have real responsibilities at home, I was glued to my computer screen. Every spare hour that wasn’t spent on family care was sacrificed to finish another essay or track down another deadline.
The process also stripped away my authentic voice. To win aid, you’re asked to package your lived experiences into a polished pitch. Sitting at a screen at 2 a.m., unpacking my family’s financial struggles for committees of strangers, forced me to sound older and more corporate than I actually was.
The outcome and what came after
After dozens of applications and months of late nights, the work paid off. The cumulative value of the financial aid and scholarship offers I received across those 20-plus acceptance letters passed $1 million, and I ultimately accepted a full ride to NYU.
When my mom saw the official financial aid package, she cried in relief. For the public, that million-dollar stat made a great headline. For my family, it meant I could attend the school I chose without taking on crushing debt.
I graduated from NYU in 2026 with my degree in film and television. Looking back, that experience taught me how to navigate complex systems and advocate for myself when no road map existed.
We talk a lot about the American dream, the idea that hard work opens every door. But my experience has shown that the playing field isn’t level from the start. For students without wealth, getting good grades is only half the battle. The other half is surviving an exhausting second job just to pay for the chance to compete.
I reached my goal, but no 18-year-old should have to work an unpaid graveyard shift every night just to earn a seat at the table.
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