Hi, my name is Emmett, and I'm fundraising for the last bit of tuition I'll ever have to pay.

The short version of the story is this: I've been in graduate school for too long so the university will no longer provide funding or cover my tuition. To pay off what I owe the university, register for one credit, and regain access to my research, I need $2700.

The long story is this: I'm a Ph.D. candidate in educational neuroscience. In March 2020, I was about to propose my dissertation (something about having people come into the lab and do math while wearing an EEG cap). Then COVID hit. It turns out it's hard to have people come into the lab and wear EEG caps when there's a plague on, so I had to come up with a brand new idea for a new dissertation in which I could collect data online. This took a long time. I proposed the new dissertation (which I am very proud of) in October of 2021. My proposal was accepted, and I was immediately informed that I would no longer receive a graduate assistantship (basically, the tiny paycheck I'd received from the university since 2016) or have my tuition covered starting Spring 2022.

I needed to get a job immediately. Despite spending 3 months applying for all sorts of jobs that people said were hiring everyone that walked in the door, I could only find basically-minimum wage work doing manual labor for less than 20 hours a week. I had no savings. I could barely feed myself and put gas in the car to get to work, let alone pay rent. So I didn't pay rent for April and May. I lived on the university campus in family housing, so the unpaid rent for these two months resides in the same payment portal that tuition is paid through.

I can't pay tuition until I pay the back rent.

Because I'm not registered for any classes for fall yet and am no longer classified as an employee of the university, I cannot access my Box folder that holds the last six years of my research, including my dissertation.

I must finish my Ph.D. It's not an option. I'm too close to the end not to cross the finish line now.

The two months of back rent (plus the very steep late fee) is $1700. The tuition for one graduate-level credit is $1000. I got a new job that pays a little better, but it's still not enough to come up with $2.7k in under a month (gosh, can you imagine?). I've exhausted all the options from within the university- applying for hardship funds (I don't qualify because I'm not registered for any credits right now), asking the department for help (they're apparently happy to be rid of me), and asking my advisor to help figure something else out instead of registering for classes (lol).

I need help.