I’m Shilah, a student at Western Washington University. I used to do Running Start at Highline College. I’m studying environmental studies. I plan on doing small town government work to try and better the planet. I want to create mandates and more to help and make environmentalism more accessible.
I chose to do Running Start at Highline because of the financial gain. My family grew up with very low income, which is why I was initially drawn toward Running Start. I could get two years of free college. I also chose it because it helped me learn how to use academic resources and how to interact with student advisors a lot. I learned how to interact with financial aid departments. Running Start seemed like the most affordable and beneficial of all the advanced options, and it ended up being so because I was able to get a job, I made good friends, and learned a lot of skills.
I’ve faced financial barriers to higher education. When I was going into college, my first job was working at the Highline cafe my senior year. That’s all the money that I had the opportunity to make because, since I didn’t have a car growing up, I couldn’t drive myself to work. My neighborhood is not safe, so public transit wasn’t an option. I had that job for six months and I was saving a lot of it. I had other things I was doing at the time to earn money too, but going into fall quarter, I was unemployed. Financial aid did not come through properly and so I had to pay my full amount for fall quarter with what I had in my savings. I was scared. Then, I got a job at the dining hall, and I was saving a lot of it.
I am not receiving any help paying for college from my family because my family cannot afford for me to go to college. I’m paying for everything on my own. It’s taken a lot of me mapping out my finances to understand where I want my education to go. I don’t want to go into adulthood with a bunch of loans. I have to map it out strategically.
Recently, I was talking to my mom because she’s trying to go back to school right now. She was like, “what am I supposed to see? How much financial aid I’m gonna get?” I told her, “you get it literally two days before the quarter starts.” You don’t even get two weeks to prepare to get a loan, you just get told two days before, “Hey, you still owe us $5000”. I think guaranteeing the first two years of college free for community and Technical College students would give people a lot more ambition.
Shilah Malaykhan, Des Moines