cornelldude12 wrote:Okay, first off, I was not saying that my family is rich, because they are far from it. I am saying that they choose to spend and save their money in irrational ways and for silly reasons, which leads them to the fallacy that they cannot pay for law school, when in reality they could at least contribute something in order to get me through. I didn't mean I was smart enough to get into the top 6, I meant that I would probably only choose to go to law school if I got into the top 6. I do love law, but with the amount of time/money I would have to muster to go through law school, it would not be worth it to settle for anything less unless it was a major scholarship at a still high school.
But like, I think most people are missing the point I was trying to make. How do schools like Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Penn, etc allocate their need money for financial aid? As in, how would they choose which people will get need grants?
I am attending a T6 school this year, am 24 and married, and have a one-year-old son. I will not be getting much aid from my school. I would rather drink poison than ask my upper-middle-class parents to subsidize my law school education.
Your parents probably have spent the last twenty something years pulling ou and your siblings faces through life. Who cares if they want to spend their extra means on a cruise, cigarettes, McDonalds, Faberge eggs , or anything else weird or excessive?
Two years ago my wife was pregnant with my son and was in the hospital with serious kidney problems. Our old car was in the shop for a big repair and I had no idea how I was going to pay for anything baby or life related. My parents were not able to provide much assistance. At the same time I was taking 16 credits in an uber-competitive top UG business school and finishing another major in Chinese. I had for some time been establishing a Chinese manufacturing consulting business. Even in my darkest time, when it looked like everything would fall apart, I pushed forward with faith in myself and God’s purposes for me. I had no sleep, spent three hours after midnight every night conducting conference calls with China, conducted business meetings out of hospital rooms, and found myself having only hours to study when others had weeks. With no money I had to charge plane flights to China off of credit cards and worry about my sick/pregnant wife and exams while trying to get needed sleep on flights. I had plenty of desperate moments, but I kept pushing and eventually found success in my business, school, and life.
Easy opportunities are dwindling in America. If you do have the honor to get into a T6 school, deciding not to go for a crap reason like your parents decided not to spend money on you would be stupid. Learn to bootstrap and rely on yourself or I promise you will one day run out of opportunity. Conversely, Walmart still has opportunities for those that can speak Spanish and some call centers haven’t been outsourced to India.