I've lived an interesting life for the past 40 years (birth-10 yrs old was easy). Now, at 50, I can say with absolute certainty that I know what I want to do with the rest of my life. My formal educational journey has been wildly inconsistent due to life circumstances. I came from the wrong side of the tracks in Tampa, FL, and when folks say that the schools are failing our kids, I can tell you that it has a lot more to do with what's going on in a kid's inner world than it is the school directly. My experience of high school could be a book by itself - a cautionary tale of a teenager who could have at any moment, fallen into any one of the situations most parents pray never happens. Whether you believe in God, luck, guardian angels, or my inner voice (and those of my parent's voices) guiding me along - I came out unscathed by the people around me, teenage pregnancy, jail and even death. This is what I was up to while most of my peers were doing the college prep track and this is the reason for the delay.

That's not to say I didn't do anything since -- I did manage to get an issued US patent, my A.A. in Business Admin from a community college in 2013, be a solopreneur for the last decade, survive several health scares and am living a simple but happy life with my fiance and dog here in Las Vegas. But what I plan to do next is bigger than me and therefore, more important than anything I've done to date. I've transferred into the Psychology B.A. program at UNLV as a junior and I'm an Honor Student to boot! As some of you may know, a Bachelor's in Psychology is just a stepping stone to get into graduate school, which is firmly where I'm headed. Let me tell you my ideas...

After my bachelor's, I will go on to get my Master's in Educational Psychology and likely move onto a PhD in Cognitive Psychology, in order to do research with young children. I believe we are completely omitting several foundational skills in our children's developmental education. Our society focuses more on creating workers than we do on creating self-thinking humans. We teach history without teaching the context with which those histories took place based on cultural anthropology. We touch on critical thinking here and there, when it should be it's own subject taken as frequently as social studies. We throw kids into the most brutal social setting of all and give them no education in basic psychology or communication. Financial education aims at teaching kids how to manage a checking account and a household - but there are interactive ways we can teach them a work ethic, and global economics (and their role in it) in a way they can actually relate to. This is what I aim to change and this is what your donations will be supporting. It will take more than a village to make these changes begin - it'll take a nation. I know this is a very big "fix", and I'm a big idea specialist. Thank you for your time in reading this and thank you for your support!

The total amount I'm asking for is directly for tuition and books and nothing more. I will need to make part-time hours be enough to support myself for housing, insurance, transportation, food, etc. I'm also applying for multiple scholarships which mostly require you to be a full-time student. I've also taken out loans.