It's no secret how expensive university can be, especially without any scholarship nor financial aid. This is especially true for being a student in a creative major. To show you, this is how much this semester costs (without financial aid):

Let's not joke, higher education in general is not cheap at all. And when considering universities, sometimes you have no choice but to pay out. Having a degree is practically a standard requirement in almost all forms of jobs now. Luckily, for the Malaysian animation industry at least, at minimum you need a diploma but for me, after surveying, it was better to go and straight away get a degree.

SteemIt and Lifting Burdens

A little less than 2 months ago, when my lecturer @sireh told us about SteemIt, one of the taglines he used "You can probably earn enough to buy an iPhone if you post good content". At the time, my tuition fee bill just came in and my PTPTN (an governing body that basically gives student loans) brought down my tuition fee to around RM 2,600.

For international readers, yeah, in Malaysia, student loans don't pay for 100% of your tuition fees. Depending on your family's level of income, it typically covers around 50% of the fees(?).

That's when I decided to try to pay it off myself. I paid it in increments because there were some things happening in life that needed the extra money. I brought down my fees to around RM 1,600 first.

And tonight, I just paid off the rest of it.

Feeling Guilty

The reason I decided to do this was not wholly selfless, in truth, it was because of guilt. I'm the eldest child of six in my family so I've always felt that I was selfish for choosing to do Animation, which is something I wanted, instead of a course something more traditionally brag-worthy at family gatherings. It was considered odd since a majority of my family were either engineers, accountants, teachers, etc.

Me and my younger brother by 2 years are in college but the rest of them are still in primary school. Paying for two kids in college can be pretty financially straining so this is probably the least I could do to help out.

But now I'm bit more relieved and excited to text my mom to tell her she doesn't have to worry about this portion of the bills. Although...now she'll probably assume I'm either in an MLM scheme or doing drugs. I haven't exactly told her I've been doing SteemIt yet haha.

Anyways, that ending was a little sad so here's a picture of the family cat.

Until then, see your next post!

Logo by @cartoonistpanda and banner design by @zomagic.