WRY BREAD: A Slice of My Life in Pursuit of Dough

This College Student Tests Her Inner Strength Every Day, Paying Her Way Through School—and Paving the Way

for Her Success

By Gail Harlow

            There is a young woman I know by the name of Amy, who is the hardest-working 23-year-old I’ve ever met. Amy serves beer and cheese steaks (and omelets and shrimp scampi) four nights a week, catering to a tough crowd at a local horse-betting establishment. She attends college five days a week. And she doesn’t take summers off. She'll graduate in December. A perfectionist who is her own severest critic, she studies all the time: on the treadmill, on the way to work, during breaks at work, in bed. I wouldn’t be surprised if she even studied in her sleep. She agonizes over test scores and term papers. Her hard work has paid off; last semester she earned a 3.88 grade average. She’s majoring in psychology and is considering working with children one day. Watch out world, if Amy passes her work ethic and determination to succeed on to the children she comes into contact with in the years to come!

            “What drives some of us to succeed and others to amble casually through life?” I wonder whenever I see her. She makes me feel lazy by comparison. For me, college was a walk in the park; as an English major, I was engaged in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Sure, I had vague, romantic notions of working in publishing, but I wasn’t pursuing my bachelor’s degree as a steppingstone to those specific career goals. I was living the Socratic ideal. Also, the coed ideal: My parents paid my tuition. (In an ironic twist, they didn’t cover my brothers’ tuition; boys, they reasoned, were tougher and could help to pay their own way through school. Imagine my ambivalence, as a feminist, in accepting this “sexist” benefit!)

             I know Amy because I often grab a quick bite at the club where she works, which is near my office. Smart, amiable, charming and talkative, she appears to have no secrets. Yet she knows something that many young people today struggle to figure out. She knows what she wants and what she has to do to get it. She doesn’t expect life to be easy.

            “Every day it is hard for me to get up and continue in the right path, have confidence in myself, and understand that life is not meant to be easy,” she told me the other day. “Life itself is a challenge, and the only way I can try to defeat it is by setting realistic goals and attaining them on a daily basis.”  (Yes, she really said that. Isn’t she amazing?) Having chatted with her many times in the last two years, I have some idea of what twists of life may have inspired in her this astonishing maturity and single-minded determination to prove what she’s made of.  “Upon entering adulthood, I thought to myself I have two choices,” she continues. “ One, I can harp on my situation and ‘wallow in self-pity,’ or two, I can take this ‘deck of cards I’ve been dealt’ and make the most of it.  From that day on, I have chosen to focus my extra energy on success.

             “As I get closer to accomplishing my long-term goals, I become more and more accepting of myself and the situations I am faced with. I have formed for myself a positive feedback cycle, [telling myself that] if I continue to strive for what some people accept as unattainable, the closer I will get to achieving it. The closer I get, the more I want and the harder I have to work for it.  In the end, I achieve a natural high, like a runner's high, as opposed to the kind that some others, who choose to focus their energy negatively (on what might be their last high) get.”

            I’m sure that Amy doesn’t see herself as a role model; she’ll probably blush when she reads this. But I can’t think of another young woman I’d like to have talk with Francia, the woman who wrote MAKING BREAD recently, asking, ”I’m an 18-year-old high-school student with a part-time job that doesn’t pay very much, and I have no money saved for college yet. How can I start saving?” I’m guessing that Amy would tell her, “If you want it badly enough and are willing to work hard enough, you’ll find a way.” But, of course, she has much more practical advice to offer Francia.

            “If I were starting over and going back to college,” Amy says,  “I would go to a community college part-time, during the school year as well as in the summer, and work at night. Then, when I’d saved enough money, I’d transfer to a four-year university on what they call a core-to-core or 45-plus program  (under which credits can be transferred from one school to another).  By starting out at a community college, where courses are cheaper, you won’t have as many loans, and you can still receive a bachelor’s degree in four years.  Night classes are also beneficial, because they are structured for people who work full-time jobs or are stay-at-home parents during the day.”   In other words: where there’s a will, there is a way. I suspect Francia will find it.

            No one is suggesting that it’s going to be easy for her; I now realize how fortunate I was that my parents paid my tuition, allowing me the luxury of pondering the meaning of “Waiting for Godot” without having to wait for a check to clear. But, even if they have to do it one course at a time, it is crucial that Francia and all the other young women just starting out in life do find a way to get their degrees. Angela Nissel, who wrote “The Broke Diaries,” hilariously detailing four years of poverty as a college student at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an interview with MAKING BREAD recently that the most valuable money lesson her mother taught her was: “Invest in your education. They can steal your wallet, but they can’t steal your diploma.  Whenever I start a new venture that I’m not sure will fly,” Angela says, “I always know that the temp agencies pay a little more to people with college degrees.”  A college degree means more money. More money buys more choices, greater security, and freedom from worry. It’s as simple as that. “It ain’t rocket science,” as they say in school.

            In college, I learned many things. But it’s the lessons that I’ve learned since then from women like Amy and Angela and Francia—women who strive and thrive, who don’t wait for things to get better but find ways to make them better for themselves and for others—that are really worth passing on.  Those women graduate with honors in life. They are my heroes. If situations were reversed, I wonder if I would be as strong as they are.

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Gail Harlow is the founding editor of MAKING BREAD:

 The Magazine for Women Who Need Dough. E-mail her with your comments at gail@makingbreadmagazine.com.  More specific advice for women seeking to obtain money to attend college can be found in our

” Ask the Expert” department.

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