About the Author:

Alexander Price is a non-traditional student at Rutgers University, finishing his degree in his late-20s. Working full-time and taking classes at night, he blogs about his experiences trying to straddle the real world and college. Start a conversation with him on Twitter – @asprice18.

In my journey from a freshman at Rutgers in 2002 to sophomore (and a half) in 2009, I had a lot of detours. When I first left Rutgers and went back home, I tried to kid myself for a bit that I’d be back at Rutgers in the fall. This lasted all of two months, until the fall term bill arrived and I came as close as I’ve ever been to fainting. With the reality of my situation setting in, I realized I had to find a job if I was going to make it anywhere in life after college.

At the time, my family lived in Barnegat, New Jersey. It’s not the middle of the woods (that would be Chatsworth; check it out on a map, I’m not lying), but it’s not exactly job central, even before the recession of 2008. It’s not that jobs were scarce, necessarily, just not very diverse, so I started out working landscaping. It was a decent job; good pay, outdoors, physically demanding. I enjoyed it a lot, but I knew that as the summer wound down, so would business. With the amount of guys we had, I knew I’d be getting less hours and quickly started looking for something more stable. Being a Philly native living at the Jersey shore, I ended up working at Wawa.

After a year of working there, I found a second job working at a group home for adults with developmental disabilities. As I began working there, I began to take on more hours and responsibilities at the group homes. I have a strong pull towards the disabilities field; two of my siblings have Autism, and my best friend from when I was a kid had muscular dystrophy. You could say I grew up around disabilities.

The job hunt only strengthened my belief that it would be nearly impossible to get a good paying job without a college degree. In my job hunt, two options became front runners in my hunt. The first was an open position at the Rutgers Housing Office.

I don’t mean to speak badly of the folks that work in that office, but during my freshman year, a communications snafu between them and the financial aid office caused me to be locked out of my dorm room for nearly a week. Through the help of friends and a sympathetic RA, I was able to get by until the whole thing was sorted out, but it soured my opinion of what housing does on a daily basis. The other option was a school for children with Autism, associated with Rutgers. As I weighed the two I decided that despite how hectic the job would be, I preferred to work at the school. With that decision made, I wrote up the most professional resume I could muster and sent it out. Thankfully, this was still back when resumes had to be one sheet, so my lack of experience and credentials could slip by.

I sat in the living room of my apartment one night, staring down my last week of emergency funds, wondering if I would ever hear back from the school. If I hadn’t heard from them by the end of Monday, I decided, I would take the job at housing. I sat there, staring at the red-tinted box that passed for a television and decided to check my e-mail one more time. Nothing. I was about to give up, when I checked the spam folder. It was the first time I’d ever checked it before simply hitting delete, but there was only one message, so I figured I’d see what body part they wanted to help me make larger. It was the school.

They wanted me to come in for an interview. I quickly got together the most professional outfit I could and arrived bright and early on Monday. I quickly forgot about the housing job as the school hired me and I began to get training in the teaching methods used there. After a year I became full time, providing me with benefits including tuition remission. After some time working a second job, and a semester at Middlesex County College, I applied for readmission to Rutgers and was accepted.

The first term bill I paid was the sweetest cash I ever spent, costing me only the student fees. I’ve been at the school ever since, working there during the day and going to school at night. While there are still cost considerations, they are far less than what I would have paid without my job. The bonus to it is that I end my work day, most times tired, sometimes frustrated, and every once in a while with a cut, bite, or bruise, but I go to class with the feeling that I did something useful, and helped someone’s life, even the slightest.