Hello everyone, I am new to the forum. I made an account because I'm just that desperate to get some advice on this subject. So basically, the situation is that recently, I have finally figured out my life's purpose and concocted a clear vision for it. To start with, I want to become an architect. To do that I need a professional degree on it and I don't want to just do that at any old college or university for architecture. I want to go to a school with a program that resonates with me, with an atmosphere that I'll feel nurtured in, because I've come to understand recently that the environment of your daily life, the atmosphere you're submerged in on a day to day basis, is the primary factor in deciding your thoughts, emotions, and mentality. For this reason, I feel that I must go to this specific school to study architecture. But the problem is that the university is a private, international institution in Spain, so the experience of being there comes packaged with a mountain of study abroad costs. I live in the US, so yearly airfare costs, food costs, living costs, housing costs, supplies costs, and tuition are all going to factor in, along with storing my things over breaks. I estimate the total cost to be around $300,000 or more over 5 yrs. This monetary value truly embeds the fear of god in me, because I come from a lower middle class family. Only my father works in my family, and nearly every cent he brings in is utilized in financing our living costs. He doesn't really have more than dime or two to give for my education, no matter how much he wants to. I barely have a 1k left in my bank account. I know conceptually that there are lots of grants and scholarships out there for students to finance their education, but I dropped out of my last college due to boredom and disinterest over what I was studying, during a period of depression. I had picked a major over the monetary value in that career and failed miserably. It's safe to say that I don't have the best transcript from that college. But I have no student debt from there either because I got in with a full scholarship. This fact makes my fear of debt grow even stronger because I have none so far, never experienced it, and only keep hearing how student debt destroys people's lives all the time for their entire lifetime or at least most of it. But despite that, I want this school, I want the chances and experiences their program offers me more than anything right now. I am studying to retake the SAT/ACT and have enrolled in a community college to get my GPA up.
So my question is what advice do you have for me? Have you ever studied abroad? If so, for how long, and how did you finance it. Do you know of any grants or scholarships, or any other kind of resource that would be useful for my situation. But most of all, do you know how I can overcome this fear or if I should even overcome it. Any advice at all from anyone would be much appreciated. Thank you in advance and sorry for any typos, I don't have time to review it. Have to get to class
