Be it through a Board of Governors Grant or your own checking account, City College students are finding ways to pay for their education.

Although sometimes state funding isn’t quite enough, even with his Board of Governors waiver to pay for books and other school niceties, Mike Buckley works full time which he says takes a lot of time away from studying, leaving him to do homework between classes. The balance, however, leaves him with a healthy level of stress that pushes him to work hard and not waste his own time.

Even with educational needs fully covered, Nikki Gordon, a City College student keeps on top of things because she says she wants to work harder to not waste Dad’s money, although even if she were to receive a grant she would keep working just as hard without the threat of parental reprimands and lectures over the cost of education.

A quick glance at the lines outside the Financial Aid office will show you how many students still need help in paying their way through school.

“It would be difficult,” Jules Hatchett says. “I would find other means.”

Private financers are many, but they’re also far more selective than colleges themselves, so they’re not a reliable way of funding after classes have started.

Still waiting on his BOGG fee waiver to clear, the cost of books still worries City College student Sameer Amir.

“Makes you think twice,” Amir said. “Are multiple $120 math books worth it? Or should we balance that with a more cost-effective $70 grammar handbook instead?”

I am, however, thoroughly impressed by the work ethic and optimism of the students I found on my wholly unscientific poll, because, I’ll be honest, I did not have that at all.

With the cost of books handled by my parents, and tuition by the all important BOGG, academic failure I think is the only term that could hope to describe my first two years in the Los Rios system. I bounced from major to major, communication one semester, English education the next, a brief stint in psychology, and finally dead-ending in journalism. My classes-attempted list doesn’t come close to anything that could be on a transfer list, much less a humble GED. As for my grades, those first few semesters, I hope whoever ends up handling my transfer does as well as I did to ignore them.

Was my poor performance really the effect of my disconnect from the short-term responsibilities that schooling entails? Or was it a more direct side effect of discovering a disposable income that could be wasted on fast women and cheap cars (which I guess could have been solved if I, personally, had paid for that $150 trig book I failed at using properly). Maybe it was, as I like to think, merely an effect of a young creatively inclined person having no idea what to do with his future, and taking his time to feel out his path in life.

No matter which is the truth, I’ll agree with Nikki Gordon when she says, “It depends on the person.”

Even if that means, students of City College, you’re all better than me. Congrats.