Financial crisis

I’m running out of money.

I’d like to put the blame on the high cost of education, a tough economy, or some other debilitating side effect caused by our flawed economic superstructure. But I can’t truthfully blame anything or anybody but myself.

I currently have $1,473.79 in the bank. Next semester, I will have to make my final tuition payment ($1,089). So when I graduate in May—if all goes according to plan—it looks like I’ll have about $384.79 left (if my part-time job wages continue to cover all my living costs).

Let me try to explain how I got in this situation.

There have been two phases to my debt-free college-degree experiment. The first phase was in the spring semester of ’09—my first semester—when I arrived at Duke with just $4,000. In this phase I was poor.

The second phase began in the fall of ’09 when I came back from my well-paying Park Service job as a backcountry ranger in Alaska with well over 10K in the bank. In this phase I was radically frugal—and I’ve been in this phase ever since.

Despite having money—after my summer at the Park Service—I chose to carry over many aspects of my initial frugal phase. I stayed in my van; I rarely, if ever, ate out; and I still shopped at places like The Salvation Army.

Yet, I did use my money a bit more freely. I bought a new and expensive pair of hiking boots. I started buying my groceries at Whole Foods rather than Kroger. I stopped meticulously keeping track of my every penny. I felt more at ease taking long gas-guzzling trips to David’s and the Appalachian Trail. And instead of working 20 hours at my part-time job, I only worked 12.

This past summer I chose not to work so I could focus on my studies and on my book proposal. It was a bold move, I realized. After all, I could have gone back to Alaska and brought back another 10K+.

Still, I thought I’d be alright. Besides, I had plenty of money left over from my ’09 summer job.

But because of some bad spending habits and some unforeseen expenses, I’m down to close-to-nothing again. For one, I strayed from making my meals from cheap bulk items (beans, rice, oatmeal), instead treating myself to cheeses, yogurts, and expensive vegetables like avocados.

I even—I’m ashamed to admit—paid for a haircut. At first, I thought I’d save money and give myself one. I locked myself in a bathroom and tried to give my hair a light trim since it was starting to get into my eyes. Before I even started, I realized how dumb an idea this was. I knew that cutting hair would probably fall into the category of things that I will forever be terrible at. When it comes to pointless aesthetic touch-ups—like making beds, sweeping floors, or polishing cars—I know I’ll somehow—by virtue of my carelessness—end up making whatever I’m doing look worse than it originally was.

After a few snips, I realized I did irreparable damage to my hair. I accidently removed all of my bangs, but still had long hair on the top, sides, and back of my head, exposing my high hairline and accentuating my long, flowing locks—sort of like Chucky.

Embarrassed, I wore a hat for the next few days and when I couldn’t deal with it any longer, I took my travesty to the barbershop and very guiltily spent $20 on a non-necessity.

And my van—because of several back and forth trips from David’s to Duke this past summer (2 hours each way)—needed a series of repairs.

I got new tires ($330), new front brakes ($350), and a ball joint issue resolved ($350). In a matter of weeks, I’d lost over $1,000 on my van alone. That’s when I took a close look at my bank account, shrieked, and decided I needed to go back to my old frugal ways.

Between my financial crisis and my recent parking lot drama, I felt, for a moment, like my little world was crashing down. Nothing seemed certain or secure. My van was breaking down, I was getting kicked out of my neighborhood, and my shower slippers were falling apart. I felt like the protagonist in Barton Fink whose crumbling hotel room corresponded with his own psychological degradation.

Since then, I’ve upped my working hours from 7 to 13 at my part-time job tutoring kids.

I signed up for two MRI studies, bringing in a clean $75 cash for just a couple hours of work.

And I stopped shopping at Whole Foods—where I’d buy local, organic stuff—and now shop at the cheaper, though less ethically-sound, Kroger supermarket.

And I’ve begun scavenging for food wherever and whenever I can get it. It’s amazing how much money there is at Duke. I went to a film that a student group was showing just so I could eat at their lavish (and free) reception. Here, they’re serving tea smoked red fish mousse crostini with Terrace Hub Sauce, brown butter pear bars, pecan tarts, and butter squash goat cheese croquettes.

To go on an aside… I can’t help but feel embarrassed for the waiters and waitresses who proudly, beamingly, read off the specials, pronouncing each extra adjective on a dish with rhetorical flourish, as if it was them who’d gathered all the ingredients and prepared the meal. Frankly, I’ve found that the more adjectives there are on an entrée, the nastier it tastes and the costlier it is. When I’m in a situation where I must order such a meal, I obstinately reduce whatever it is I’m ordering to a word. “I want fish,” I say with a neanerthalithic grunt. Anyway, despite the long titles, I got all this food for free.

Here I found a goldmine—a platter of vegetables that someone just left on a table in a classroom. I’ve also found a half a package of Oreos, and a half eaten pizza in the library, among many other neglected dishes.

Now that I’ve taken these necessary measures, I’ve achieved some semblance of financial stability. While I will be running on empty soon enough, I should—according to my math—easily be able to make my last tuition payment next semester.

How do I feel about my situation? There is, admittedly, a small part of me that thinks—“Gee, in a few months, I’m going to be completely broke, practically homeless, and will have no possessions of significant value. I’ll have no health insurance, a worthless degree, and probably won’t have a job.”

But that’s just a small part of me. I knew, all along, I was putting myself in a financially vulnerable situation. Hell, if there’s one Master’s Degree that will most certainly not better your chances at getting a job, it’s Liberal Studies—the program I’ve enrolled in. I knew this.

But financial security is not and never has been my goal. The ONLY thing that is important to me is that I graduate debt-free. I don’t care if I have to sell the van and sleep in stairwells. I don’t care if I have a dollar left in my bank account in May. All I care about is achieving my goal.

I believe that to pursue and achieve a goal, you sometimes need to view the world with a sort of tunnel vision. You need to blur all the temptations, detours, and sidetracks on your peripheries in order to keep sharp focus on your goal. All I see ahead of me right now, wavy and mirage-like on the horizon, is my goal of graduating debt-free. Once I do that, then I’ll worry about eking out a living.

Why go to college?

Dear Ken,

Kudos to you for taking such a daring adventure. I love the book Walden and you are a modern example of it.

I am 18 years old and in my first year of university. Two months in, and I’m not enjoying it too much.

I cherish simplicity and live as humbly as possible. I hardly spend money except on food and shelter. I even dumpster dive. I know you are the same.

And truth be told, I’d love to live in a van.

That said, why am I, and why are you, in university? I can’t find a good answer to this and I’m considering dropping out. I feel like I chose to go to university just cause I get good grades and everyone else was doing it. Also, my family really expected me to go. But the thing is, it’s just a piece of paper, a diploma. If I drop out, I can learn all the material on my own, without the stress and money involved. I can work, but my lifestyle wouldn’t require much working; just a little bit to cover my minimal expenses. I can spend my days with loved ones and learning. I can take a greater role in the community with volunteering and activism.

Perhaps you can help me by offering the reasons why you’ve chosen to get a degree and take on the stress and financial burdens. I’m not saying/accusing that you don’t have valid motives. I suspect you have very valid motives, and I would love to hear them. It would greatly help me as I weigh my options.

Huge respect,

Nick from Canada

Nick,

Your email made my day. Slapped a smile right on my goddamned face—not just because I’ve learned of yet another kindred spirit who shares this world with me, but also because it’s people like you who, every now and then, renew my faith in humanity.

I normally don’t send emails in the form of an essay, but the subject calls for it. So please excuse me for my formal tone, and for—what will probably be—an unreasonably long and largely uninteresting history of my education.

***

When Thoreau was 31, Harvard—his alma mater—sent him an alumni questionnaire. One of the questions on it (quite innocently) asked what his profession was. Thoreau—in a tone that some might call “brash”—wrote,

I am a Schoolmaster, a private Tutor, a Surveyor, a Gardener, a Farmer, a Painter, (I mean a House Painter) a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-laborer, a Pencil-maker, a Glass-paper-maker, a Writer, and sometimes, a Poetaster.

If his intro didn’t communicate it, he emboldened his condescension in his letter’s conclusion:

P. S. — I beg that the class will not consider me an object of charity, and if any of them are in want of any pecuniary assistance and will make their case known to me, I will engage to give them some advice of more worth than money.

Thoreau hated Harvard and he didn’t hide it. He famously said that Harvard “[teaches] all the branches and none of the roots.”

My undergraduate education at the University at Buffalo didn’t leave nearly so sour a taste in my mouth. In fact, I was quite indifferent about school, perhaps because I hadn’t reached the level of intellect necessary to bring something into question the way only the perspicacious can.

Like you, Nick, I enrolled in college hardly of my own volition. But, unlike you, it took me a long while before I even thought about why I was there or why I was spending so much money to be there.

It’s tough to explain just why I decided to enroll in undergraduate college, perhaps because there never really was a “decision.” I never weighed pros and cons; I never considered other options. In fact, the only options I thought about had to do with which school was going to get my money. And I point all this out—not because I think I’m an interesting minority—but because I think the way I thought is the way the great majority of young people think about their education at first. And when young people—caught in a vulnerable stage of development—are expected to make a five-digit decision that could affect them for the rest of their lives, they often (and understandably) make decisions that they’ll later regret.

My high school classmates and I—like most eighteen-year-olds of our generation—thought less like individuals, and more like a school of fish: While we had the physical capacity to go off on our own, to do our own thing, and to make our own life decisions, there was some overpowering, irresistible force sweeping us all into the halls of an academy like debris into a dustpan.

The social pressure to go to college was—I can’t emphasize this enough—incredible. Throughout my primary and secondary education, no one—and I mean no one—even passively mentioned an alternative to going to college. Sure, some kids were encouraged to enroll in trade schools; and others, to enlist in the military, but I honestly cannot think of anyone who tried to show us the countless options that we could pick from; and these options—by virtue of them being right in front of our noses—were invisible. No one talked about the merits of traveling, or the virtues of work; no one spoke about anything except going to college.

This—in hand with other forces—fostered an intensely competitive social atmosphere. One’s “success” and social status was in large part measured by how highly his prospective college was ranked. Those going to community colleges were considered inferior, and those heading off to top-tier private and state schools were envied.

By school and other forces beyond my ken, my classmates and I were molded into a certain sort of human being, who were then funneled into college—where most would experience further programming in slightly more exclusive pods.

From a very early age, I was programmed to think: “I need to go to the best college I can get into, no matter the cost.” And while it was ultimately my fault for applying to schools that would cost me so much, it’s evident to me—looking back—that it wasn’t just me who made “my” decision to go to school.

For the first couple years, I kind of just drifted through college. Despite my apathy, it didn’t once occur to me that I could leave school. I was mentally incapable of grasping the idea of self-ownership—that my life was my own; that I could do anything I wished with it; that I could—at any moment—cast off the chains that I’d unknowingly wrapped around myself.

My sophomore and junior years passed much the same way: I fulfilled my general education requirements, I sampled courses from different departments, and I mostly listened to lectures in large auditoriums, oftentimes with several hundred students. Occasionally, I’d enjoy a course or a lecture, but for the most part I continued to thoughtlessly drift with the current.

It wasn’t until late in my junior year that I actually began to enjoy college. In the English department, I read Shakespeare; in the history, I studied the Constitution and founding fathers. In my senior year, my classes got smaller. We had passionate discussions in seminars, I started to write for my school newspaper, I interned with a local progressive newspaper, and I developed relationships with a few of my professors. Every day I could feel myself growing: I was writing and speaking better; I was thinking with unprecedented clarity. My curiosity was piqued, my passions roused, and my brain hungered, insatiably, for knowledge. I loved school, so much that I’d stick around for a fifth year. Those last few years represented a period of intense personal growth; it was a renaissance of sorts. I learned that college was worth it after all.

And then I graduated.

I moved to Alaska to pay off my debts, oftentimes working alongside people who had never set foot in a college classroom. In Coldfoot, in the coworker housing unit I lived in—a refurbished forty-room trailer with paper-thin walls that once housed workers during the construction of the Alaska pipeline—I had, on one side of me, Mike—a half-Vietnamese/ half-American schizoid and alcoholic. Mike would kick open the hallway doors while sputtering fake bullets that sprayed from a pair of invisible machineguns that he carried on each arm. On my other wall was Morey—an 18-year-old pothead from Colorado—who I could hear at any hour snoring, blowing bubbles in his bong, or strumming tunes on his guitar. Caveman Dan, a lodge cleaner, saw action in Panama. Paul, a carpenter, brought with him an arsenal of automatic weapons. Chad, a tour guide, had a thirty-strong dog team. I hitched with truckers, rubbed elbows with hunters, and gave tours to upper-crust septuagenarians.

These were just a couple of the many personalities and groups I came to know intimately. Later, I lived in a predominantly black Mississippi ghetto, I delivered packages alongside a homophobic UPS truck driver, and I lived with Alaskan natives in a remote, one-road village at a Park Service ranger station in Bettles.

I moved around for years. I was in a state of constant interaction with a variety of classes and cultures. At first, I thought this was what a real education was—the education I was getting outside of classroom walls. I learned about alcoholism and drug addictions. I saw people living subsistence lifestyles and others wallowing in abject poverty. On the road, along rivers, and atop lonely mountains I was able to continue to “discover” myself.

But it wasn’t long before I started to miss college. More and more, I fantasized about locking myself behind the bars of a university again. That’s because the intellectual capacities that I’d worked so hard to develop were gradually fading: my writing was plateau-ing; I was speaking less articulately; and the thinking muscles I had to constantly flex in school atrophied from disuse.

I tried to compensate by writing daily introspective emails to my best friend, and by reading book after book after book. But nothing worked to retard my regression. I needed back the structure of school.

My cultural experiences were invaluable, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything, nor all the friendships I made over the years. But there came a point when I realized that I still had a lot to gain from school, but little else to gain—in terms of self-development—from the people around me. There are things in the outside world that you can’t get at a university, but there are things at a university that you can’t get from the outside world.

And to be the best man I could be; to give myself the tools to make a difference; to “save the world,” I needed to go back to school.

While Thoreau hated school, he’d eventually come to realize how Harvard had played an invaluable role in his development. Thoreau biographer, Robert Richardson, says:

When [Thoreau] returned from college, Harvard, with all its shortcomings, had taught him how to pass judgment on Harvard, and had in fact prepared him for a life of the mind. Acknowledgment would come later.

At Harvard, Professor Channing helped Thoreau fine-tune his writing. His studies in Greek, Latin, Italian, French, German, and Spanish enabled him to glean wisdom from ancient texts that would later saturate his own.

But, unlike Thoreau, many of the other “greats” didn’t need school. Jack London spent less than a year at Berkeley. Hemmingway and Twain didn’t need a college education, and Steinbeck left Stanford without a degree, traveling and taking a series of odd jobs. Some of America’s greatest leaders—Washington, Franklin, Lincoln—though lifetime learners, never enrolled in college. The most impressive mind I’ve ever come across sits atop the body of a hunter from the rural village of Wiseman, Alaska (pop. 15)—a man who dropped out of college before his first semester ended. The list goes on and on.

Thoreau moved to Concord where he could be near Emerson and other transcendentalists who would provide him with a “graduate education” superior to what any school could possibly offer.

What I’m getting at is: there’s no formula to follow. Some people, like me, need school. Others surround themselves with books and brilliant people and they can “elevate their minds” without having to make hefty tuition payments.

If you know why you’re in school, I think you belong there. If you don’t, then leave and don’t come back until you do. Perhaps, after a while, you’ll learn, like I did, that college really is benefiting you; that there’s a “point” to school. There are merits to sticking it out, even if the benefits of school are not readily obvious to you. But I think this is, for many, a recipe for disaster.

Many students who “stick it out” end up handcuffing themselves to a life that they really never intended to live. They have trouble getting off the career track they put themselves on when they hardly knew themselves or what they really wanted to do with their lives. And the debts that they accrued make getting off that track so much harder.

A college education should provide students with minds that will function in the world at large, not just in the workplace. It should helps us figure out the big questions that will follow us everywhere: what’s worth fighting for; who’s been lying to us; what the point of it all is. A college education, more than anything, should make us citizens before it makes us careerists.

But school, sometimes, does the exact opposite. The university experience—the major we’re forced to declare, the internships we’re compelled to apply to, and the debts we accumulate—too often closes more doors than it opens. It, like high school, winnows us into a certain type of individual. College makes us into “experts”—experts who are great at one thing, but can’t do or think about much of anything else. College helps us become the orthopedic surgeon, the real estate lawyer, the 8th grade math teacher. Every May, a slew of professionals walk off commencement stages with brains brimming with knowledge, but souls severely lacking in empathy, imagination, and the ability to exercise introspection—characteristics crucial for any self-respecting citizen to function within a democracy.

Many of these people walking off stages are not terrible human beings, but they are morally vacuous; they do not care if their job hurts more people than it helps, so long as they earn a paycheck at the end of the week.

“If a man is a fool,” says Desmond Bagley, “you don’t train him out of being a fool by sending him to university. You merely turn him into a trained fool, ten times more dangerous”

***

To give advice about college, one is forced to ponder, not just the point of school, but the point of “it all.” And this is where I enter murky territory. While I’m in no position to tell someone what ought to be important to them, I suppose there’s no harm in sharing what’s important to me:

I want to the best man I can possibly be. And I’m willing to suffer through a period of misery, sacrifice and discomfort—which a college education often is—if it will equip me with the knowledge, tools, and wisdom that will, in the end, enable me to improve the lives of others. Of course, this goal has been created with self-interested aims, too, for helping people, affecting change, creating original works, and setting myself up to have a real and meaningful purpose will, I suspect, lead to a happier and more fulfilling life.

But college isn’t the only way to accomplish this. Before you’re forced to major and narrow your studies, it would be helpful to know just what you’re passionate about—and such insights rarely come from school alone. So perhaps you should take to the woods, to find the “roots” that Thoreau could not unearth within the confines of his classroom.

I hope that you do not think that you’re in a predicament—No, this is anything but. You are blessed with an awareness that is rare for your age—an awareness that will be an invaluable asset when it comes time to making the big decisions, such as this one.

Whatever you do, I hope that if you leave, you leave knowing that you’re not exiting the classroom, but that you’re merely entering another. And that—even in our most self-interested and solitary endeavors (such as on a journey)—the brotherhood of man continues to run through us all. We’d be fooling ourselves to think that fulfillment comes from selfish acts, and that—whatever your pursuits—I hope that the end goal is not just the betterment of yourself, but the betterment of others. To change the world, as my favorite movie tagline goes, you must first let it change you.

Thoreau would daily embark on long afternoon walks. He lived alone in his cabin for two and a half years. He was, by all definitions, a hermit, and a curmudgeonly one at times, too.

But he came to the determination—based on his education in both his Walden cabin and Harvard classroom—that it would be an irresponsible expression of his life to live just for himself. And that is, I believe, the very reason why he took off on his own; and that is why I’ve cloistered myself within my own upholstered hermitage. Sometimes to play a part in this great big world, we must separate ourselves from it.

But don’t listen to me. Thoreau said it best: “Be not simply good, be good for something.”

Happy trails,

Ken

PS: Mind if I use this as a blog entry?

The “Dare Mighty Things” Scholarship

I am familiar with rejection. I’ve been rejected by colleges (13), potential employers (15+), internships (50+) and women (lost count long ago).

Yes, I’ve been rejected a lot. But, like anyone who’s consistently failed, I’ve developed ways to deal with it.

First, you remind yourself about all the great people who failed early on in life, but who, in the end—with tireless perseverance and unflinching resolve—proved their naysayers wrong. Then you—from the confinement of your home—cast invectives, declare revenge, violently bang your head against a mattress, and aspire to “show” your rejecter just how wrong he was. And then, finally, you get really, really drunk. Works every time.

For some reason, the sting of a rejected scholarship application tends to linger. Perhaps it’s because there are always other jobs, internships and girls out there in that great big sea. But when it comes to getting money for college, you’re shit out of luck if you can’t get a scholarship.

I don’t know how many of my scholarship applications have been rejected. Perhaps, someday, a team of scientists will create an equation that could help me make a reasonably close estimate. But for now, let’s just says it’s “a lot.”

When I applied to scholarships in high school, I didn’t have much going for me. The problem was multifold:

1.) I had a pedestrian high school academic record: I was ranked (a very mediocre) 77th in my high school class of 200, I passed my final physics exam by only one point, and I didn’t impress any of my teachers.

2.) I had no interests or passions outside of girls, hockey, football, the Buffalo Sabres and my irrational desire to drive to Alaska. I never volunteered, took part in clubs, or held student office. I was, yes, a slacker. And no matter the amount of gloss I brushed onto my applications, I could never fool the people making the decisions.

3.) I was never right for a scholarship. I never fit the requirements. I didn’t have the grades, the bullshit clubs, or the sports accolades. I had something, but nothing that a scholarship committee could ever see.

My scholarship rejection streak finally ended during the first of my two senior years of college when I won a $1,000 award from the University at Buffalo’s history department. But by then, my debt had accumulated to such unfathomable proportions that this little bit of money was too little, too late; it felt like I was approaching a burning building with a glass of water.

Before I came to Duke, I decided to give scholarships one more chance. Besides, I thought, I have a whole bunch of interesting life experiences to draw from and a strong undergraduate record to brag about. I even—I’m ashamed to say—told scholarship committees about my intention to live in the van to hopefully guilt them into giving me their money. Sure enough, all my applications were rejected. By this time, though, I’d known what to expect. It was up to me to fund my education.

So here’s what I want to do. I want to create a scholarship for someone like me; for someone whose potential cannot be measured by a GPA, SAT or GRE score; for someone who’s gotten no help from schools and scholarship committees because each other’s goals never aligned; and for someone who is passionate, not just about succeeding—whatever that means—but living.

The scholarship I’ve made will be for college students (juniors and seniors) on the verge of graduating. Instead of being kicked into career-world or pushed back into a graduate school, I want to encourage students to forget about planning for the future and to focus on living the present. Plus, I think a traveler gets the most out her journey–and the people she meets get the most out of her–when she sets off with a degree’s worth of eduction in her head.

***

This past June I wrote a post titled “Belated Manifesto” in which I sent money back to parents and friends because I thought their gifts interfered with my goal to graduate “debt-free.” For good reason, I got some less-than-positive feedback from the readers of this blog. And while my family was good-natured about the gesture, they refused to take the money.

So now I have $910.90 that isn’t mine, that interferes with my goal, and that—most oddly—I can’t get rid of. I decided I’d give it to a charity, but then I thought: why not create a “charity” of my own?

I’m pleased to announce that I will be giving away the first ever “Dare Mighty Things” Scholarship this winter, in honor of one of my favorite quotes (that was penned by the hand of Teddy Roosevelt):

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

Indeed, Teddy, indeed! My scholarship is designed to support students who wish to embark on an adventure of their own creation. I believe that for people to realize their fullest potential, it’s necessary to have some combination of focused academic study and broad worldly experiences. Each type of learning complements the other. On our journey, we see what’s wrong with the world, and in the academy, we acquire the tools to fix it.

While $900 will do nothing, it’s a start, and I’m hoping I can raise another $100 from the good readers of this blog to round it up to a nice $1,000. If we don’t raise that much, I’ll pay the rest on my own, and if—by chance—we exceed that goal, I’ll just put it toward next year’s scholarship. And I don’t think I have to say this but: know that none of this money will enter my pocket.

Three more things:

1.) I’ve named my best friend, fellow student debtor, and charity expert, Josh Pruyn, the Executive Vice President of the Dare Mighty Things Scholarship Foundation. He’ll help me sift through applications. I intend to advertise this on scholarship websites, so hopefully we’ll get a good pile of applications.

2.) For more info about our mission and requirements, you can click this link, or just click on the tab below the photo of me standing next to the van titled “Scholarship.”

3.) The winner will have his/her application essay posted on this blog; and hopefully we can get pictures/stories/etc. from their journey.