Chopping Wood with a College Degree

College was always tough, as I had to pay my own way through. I never received more than the bare minimum of government loans, my parents made over 100000 dollars per year. So my loans just barely covered tuition…I had to pay for room and board. To do this I worked with mentally challenged people in a group home, which payed well for a college job. As rent increased and utility bills rose, it became harder to make ends meet. I began working 40 hours per week and going to school full time, needless to say my grades could have been higher. Several of my professors asked to speak to me outside of class because of my grades and low quality of work, many of them said it was unacceptable that I was working so much. My only reply was "how else can I pay to be here?"

Life was tough, but bills got paid and food could be bought. Typical college life really…donating plasma for a little extra money to go out on the weekends, eating lots of peanut butter sandwiches. But a just over two years ago, my car and my motorcycle broke down within two weeks of each other. I didn't have the money to fix my bike, and my car was shot.

I picked up two more jobs that summer. I walked a 1.5 miles to work at 5 every morning and worked in the group home until 8:15. I walked 2.5 miles to my second job, a tedious and menial inventory job at UNI. I worked from 9 to 2, then walked 3 miles to my job as a cook, at another group home. I cooked from 330-630, which was a hell of a deal, I got fed for free, and since I cooked dinner, there was always a little extra. After work, I walked another 1.5 miles, I usually arrived home at 7.

I put in 14 hour days for the summer, walking over 8 miles a day, mostly eating food from work. I learned to make high calorie foods for little money. I made biscuits from scratch and carried them around everywhere I went. I couldn't really afford condiments, so I ate them plain. I also made a chili like meal from cans of beans, tomatoes, corn, and rice. These ingredients were the cheapest foods that provided me the energy to get to and from work every day.

At the end of the summer I saved up a thousand dollars and got a car. The car was, and still is at this time, a pile of shit. I still didn't have money to fix it, I would either fix it myself on the side of the road, or I would do labor for a local mechanic, usually fixing his computer or making him food.

I moved late December, to student teach. I still didn't have much money, now I had a full time 'job' that didn't pay any money, and was taking night classes to graduate. I lived in my parents house, while they lived in Florida for the winter, so I didn't have to pay rent. The only way I paid for gas and the very little food I did eat was by donating plasma twice per week. Student teaching turned out to be more or less the same every day, kids complaining about lunch that I would have eaten in a heart beat and complaining about having too much homework. It got tiring very very quickly.

At the end of that spring, I had no money, no job, and was quite thin. Typical former college student. Due to tension between my parents and myself, which was nothing new, I had to find a new place to live…quickly. I ended up working at a 4h camp, off of a friends suggestion.

I had the summer of my life, ate my fill daily and worked very hard, as I was accustomed. During the summer I tried to apply for jobs as a teacher, but positions have been slashed, even here in Iowa.

So I find myself in my current situation, struggling to get jobs as a substitute teacher. Cleaning bathrooms and chopping wood with a college degree in biology education, but I get free rent and utilities. Donating plasma just isn't paying off the credit card I use to buy food and gas to get to schools. I can only hope more jobs are available soon… I'm not sure how much thinner I can stretch my budget and people are starting to comment about how baggy my cloths are.

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  Jon_Cahill
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