week 13 reading

6 min readNov 21, 2020

Working while in college is not an easy task. As stated in chapter 4, tons of Americans think that working while you are in college is “a positive tradition.” Anyone who is working to get themselves through college knows that it is not in any way positive. It takes multiple hours a week away from your schoolwork and studying and there is an added expense of having to commute back and forth to your job. Not to mention that many people cannot help but bring their stress from work back home with them, which now only adds on to the stress from school you were already experiencing. This is not to say that all people struggle with working while they are in college, but it is important to point out that a lot of students do. Sometimes your school schedule and your work schedule just do not line up. Stacey’s story is a perfect example of this. She works the night shift from 11pm to 6am because the grocery store will pay their overnight workers more money. This leads to her falling asleep in class but honestly, I cannot blame her. Besides the fact that this lack of sleep is unhealthy, it is also problematic. Stacey has to work to get herself through school but her working is making her miss out on the schooling she is paying for. Clearly this is an issue. As stated in the reading, too much work decreases the chances of graduating. Maybe working while in college was more of a positive experience back in the old days but it is no longer.

The reading also mentions work study and how securing a job through it is difficult, which is definitely true. My freshmen year of Temple I was offered work study. I applied to most of the campus jobs but never heard back. Sophomore year I was offered work study again. Applied all over again and nothing. No responses. Junior year I contemplated whether it was even worth trying to get a job through the school and started to apply to jobs in Center City but nothing came of that either. So I thought to myself, I will try just one more time through the school. I hear nothing back for over a month so I just assumed it would be like the other years and I will have to solely rely on my savings and my parents for any money. At the end of September, early November I receive an email saying the Spanish department is hiring and they need someone for an office job. Of course I quickly answered and I end up getting the job during my interview. From there I worked 3 days a week for the rest of the school year before it was cut short by Covid-19.

I will say I was so grateful for the job because I did not want to blow through my savings and I felt bad asking my parents for weekly grocery money. When it comes to juggling school and work, I was lucky that I got a job that I could occasionally do school work at but once my hours changed from 2:30–5 to 8–11, I was not as happy. I had a class at 11 so I was sometimes late due to these hours my job gave me. Also on the days I had work early I was tired all day no matter what time I went to bed. This caused me to “rest” my eyes in the classes I had those days and to feel so tired that I didn’t feel like taking notes and I wasn’t really absorbing any of the information. Obviously I was grateful to be working but at the same time I knew it was starting to negatively impact me. An important point I want to make though is finding a job is not always easy. You have to dedicate time to job searching, applying, and going to interviews. This is all more time that is taken away from your schoolwork. So working during college is hard but so is looking for work in college.

The financial aid system assumes parents support their children during college. This clearly no longer reigns true in today society. As covered in chapter 6, what the American family is has changed. Comparing now to the 1960s, what families are now are very different. Less than half of all the children under the age of 18 have a family where there are two heterosexual parents who are in their first marriage. This was more than 70% of the families in the 1960s. Single parent households have now become more popular, which is more challenging for the one parent to put their child through school. Ian in the reading talks about the struggle of coming from a low income household and how his family had to stretch every dollar and share their food but his mother still made sure he got to go to college.

This assumption financial aid makes it clearly outdated. Some students have two parents but still do not make enough money to support their child going off to college. Some students have one parent or some have parents who are not even in the picture. They could live with grandparents, an aunt, an uncle. The dynamic of what a family is has changed and so should financial aid. For me, I have been lucky enough to have parents who are able to put me through school for my bachelor’s degree. If I decide to go to grad school, then that is all on me, which is understandable. I do not receive as much as you would want from financial aid but Temple luckily gave me a grant that is super helpful. Sometimes I regret going to an out of state school when I could have just stayed in New York and attended a school there for cheaper, but I stayed at Temple because it is the kind of school I wanted to go to so I am very thankful to my parents for this opportunity.

week 13 reading

Written by Miss Eleanora Romaguera