Caveat : You did ask. ;)
Have your cake & eat it, too. :sneaky: Big goals & small. Not just one or the other, but both.
Can't afford school right now?
New school - Many of the best schools are starting to publish some of their courses online. I'm not talking about 'Online Courses'. I mean Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, MIT, CalTech, etc. are putting entire classes from syllabi to the professor's lecture notes to paper assignments online. Undergrad & Postgrad classes. Its pretty sporadic, they hardly have everything online, but I saved about 20k by "taking" some of these courses self study, and then challenging their equivilent courses at my university. That's not a lot overall, I think it was only 7 or 8 classes that I was allowed to challenge to apply towards my degree. Still, better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. And self study means you set your own schedule.
Old school - Correspond with interesting people. Astrophysicists are a quirky crowd. My late uncle was one, grew up spending summers at some of their dinner parties (fun, those! It was a very mixed crowd. A lot were also into outdoor/adventure sports/backcountry shit. So you had people spiritedly debating climbing ropes in one breath, and the moons of Jupiter in the next). Like a lot of highly specialized fields... They don't really give a f*ck who you are or what your credentials are if you know your shit. Like a lot of otherwise antisocial people, they like to be liked, to be sought out for friendship & advice. You put those 2 things together? Be genuine & enthusiastic & you can have friends/mentors in the field that will help pave your way into it. // Keep your hand in. Read professional journals, attend conferences, read papers & peer review journals, LOL... That gives you something to correspond about, btw. Spend a lot of time in the stacks at universities (when I was homeless in winter or rain that's usually where you'd find me). IF there is any security at universities? It's lax. Easy to work around. <chuckling>
Alt Funding - I didn't use my GI Benefits. Long story, not relavent. Point being, I attended school on grants and scholarships. Helluva lot more of those for undergrad than postgrad degrees, but there are still tens of thousands of them available. When I was really rocking out with my cock out I was getting about 40k a year in funding. Mostly from puddly little $100 scholarships that no one bothers to apply for and that are practically going begging. You have to apply for the coming year... So I would sit and write 5/ 10 /20+ of them a week. A lot can be recycled once you have a good casche of them, with just a little bit of tweaking. The 20+? Were mostly me just spending a couple hours tweaking wording. Ignore FastWeb. Go to the library and get the tissue paper phone book list of them and work off that. FastWeb & other search engines excludes you from 90% of ones that you qualify for simply because their only requirement is that you apply. I've own scholarships from dozens of religious groups that don't specify that you have to be a member; GLBTQ that doesn't require that your sexual orientation be anything, just that your essay is on point; corporations I can even tenuously link to my degree path OR my history (I worked security for a couple engineering firms in Latin America for 20 minutes, wrote my essay on guarding their people), etc. On average I won maybe 10% of what I applied for.
Weird Jobs - I can't work M-F 9-5. I can, for a very short time, but it's not something I can do for very long. Weird jobs, though? I've worked dozens of those. Some were barter economy (let fishermen use my fishing license in exchange for half my allowance, or trade fish for lures... Fishing gets expensive needing new jigs and lures and shit. This means they fish for free, I eat for free. Ish. Had the gamakatsu, had the pouring & painting supplies). Some were gig-work. Courrier (mostly artwork & medical stuff these days, where the value is intrinsic; before electronic signatures were accepted, a lot of banking & real estate documents), finding people or losing them, underground music industry (I wanted to hear some people play, and I had a limited window, so I started calling around and would get a show put together when I had off time back when I was private. I was surprised as f*ck the first time when part of that ended up being with me getting a check at the end. Hey, sweet. I get to dance to who I wanna listen to and get paid? On it.). Some were piece work (writing for publication, selling artwork, modeling, spinning fire -poi- at a beach party, buying furniture at Goodwill refinishing it & selling it at 2x-10x what I paid, babysitting neurotic thoroughbreds, making dog leashes out of old climbing rope, writing homeschool curriculum, collecting Sage in Montana & selling it to hippies in San Francisco)... I've done a f*ckload of things over the years for cash. Most could probably be full time jobs if I had enough interest in them. I don't. But if I need money? I can make rocks bleed cash. They don't bleed on demand, hungrier I am the less likely I can find a damn rock to squeeze. But getting in the habit of looking for rocks means maybe not enough to live off of, (or maybe, some paid f*cking well) but it keeps me busy & cash comes in bits and pieces. Adds up over time. And it's 100% at my discretion whether I have the energy/interest to be doing it.
Big Goals & Small are both in the above lists. And they're hardly complete.
Improvise, adapt, overcome.
