Please help me finish college!

Hello, my name is Daveion Sims. For those who don’t really know me or my story, I hope this provides some insight. I’ve been on one crazy roller coaster in the last few years. I am going into my last semester of college, with this now being my fifth year at Hanover College. I was one of many impacted from the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020, being that I was a freshman at the time. I did my best to work through that, but we can’t all be A+ students from home. I struggled a bit, but hoped to find my footing. Right as I felt that I had that footing, tragedy struck. In January of 2022, I lost my father (the man on the left in the picture). This was followed by me needing to take some time away from school, but also induced some panic as I was worried that I may miss too much. To sum that story up, I rushed back to school to try to get back on track a little under a month and a half later. Since then, it’s been an uphill battle. In January of 2023, 15 days before the one year anniversary of my father’s passing, my grandmother also passed away (the woman in the middle of the picture). As you can imagine, this has had some ripple effects on my education. I am an engineering major, and my major is very demanding of my time and effort. I’ve only missed the month and a half of time during school physically, but it’s hard to be at school mentally since then. As a result, I’ve had to extend my college career due to dropping classes during this time. I can’t imagine not finishing this journey, and I want to rise above all of this adversity to become the first in my immediate family, and one of the first in all of my extended family, to graduate college. As my father told me shortly before he passed, giving up is not an option. I wish I could’ve walked across the stage to get my diploma with my friends and colleagues in May, but I couldn’t. I’ve felt so many emotions throughout this roller coaster, but one that I can’t help but feel is gratitude for my mother (the woman on the right in the picture). She has been my rock, and has made many sacrifices to get me to and through school. If you’re still reading this far into this, please know that her and I have shared this pain together, but she has never wavered and has gotten me this far. Please help me help her, as I wouldn’t be this close to done if not for her. We do not have an endless pool of money, nor do we have access to a large amount of money. We work hard and try our best to become better people each day. We just hope that we can be blessed to finish this journey with the help of others. I appreciate you taking the time out to read this, and I apologize for the longevity of the story. I never get to share my story, so it always means a lot to me to simply get it out. Any help that you can give is very much appreciated, even if it’s just reading this and sharing. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I hope that you are blessed beyond measure in life.