I currently attend The Borough of Manhattan Community College and I’m a Science major. I got in on an excelsior scholarship and with limited financial aid. So, I had transferred to BMCC in my freshman year in the Spring semester and was put into a remedial math course after I had taken it at my other school before BMCC and I passed it as well. It took me some time to get it dealt with but I was able to speak to a deputy teacher in the department who said that she’d try me out of it but that it was past the deadline to drop classes, but I managed through that pitfall.

Right now, the only thing that’s really holding me back is the pandemic. I have also been battling some health issues, nothing connected to Covid-19, but still enough to keep me out of class for a while. I would love to be given a break by the school board because some classes have gotten more difficult due to the professor being hard to work with and the pandemic throwing everything off. I had no loans and when I had a job I was working roughly 20 plus hours a week, since I worked when I had a day off of school or had a class finish early. I normally worked on night shifts, I was also a full time student during this time.

For some reason financial aid only paid for half of my tuition, I had no idea why, but the pandemic kinda saved me because financial aid was not paying everything. I did have to pay for what they didn’t cover, I paid out of pocket when I had a job but this semester it’s lower since I’m at home. I currently live with my parents and they predominantly pay the bills, but I do pay the gas and light bills, and sometimes other bills. I thankfully paid the max on our gas and it saved us during the pandemic.

Personally, any degree in this day and age is for me, an opportunity to not be held back by society. It’s the place that I got the most opportunity, with great teachers who have seen so much in me, since in high school and in junior high I had to compete so hard against others. So, getting this degree is a really important opportunity. I hope that I’ll be able to graduate on time because of this pandemic.