The messy, unspoken ways students actually scrape together money for school supplies
I was digging through a box of my old college stuff last weekend and found that beat-up TI-84 I got sophomore year, the one with the permanent coffee stain on the back and a faint scratch across the screen that never messed up the graphs. I remember panicking for three days when my stats prof said we needed one for the semester—new ones are over $100, and that was more than I had left in my bank account after paying for my parking pass and that month’s rent. I’d already skipped two coffee runs with friends that week to save cash, so I knew I couldn’t just pull a hundred bucks out of nowhere.
No one ever talks about this part of being a student, right? All the generic guides online tell you to apply for scholarships or pick up a steady part-time job, but when you need a $100 calculator by Monday, you don’t have time for a scholarship that takes three months to process. You do the messy, awkward, small stuff that no one posts about.
First place I looked was that weird little free supply swap in the basement of my student union. It’s just a couple of folding tables stacked with old notebooks, half-used packs of pens, textbooks from last semester, and any electronics people don’t need anymore. It’s run by student volunteers, most stuff is $5 or less, or free if you really can’t pay. I was so embarrassed to go in, honestly. The guy working the table that day was someone I’d had bio lab with the semester before, and I kept mumbling that I just preferred used stuff to new, like that made it less obvious I couldn’t afford a new one. He just nodded and rang me up for $5 for that TI-84. Didn’t ask any questions. That’s the thing about these spaces—most people running them have been in the same spot.
I’ve seen so many other little workarounds over the years, just from living with other students and hearing their stories. A lot of people just ask their professors for help, but it takes so much courage to do that. My friend Lila needed an archaeology textbook her junior year that was $180 new, and she waited three weeks to ask her prof if he had an old copy because she didn’t want him to think she couldn’t cut it or couldn’t afford the class. Turns out he had three old editions in his office closet he’d been hanging onto for exactly this reason, gave it to her for free and even joked “don’t tell the publisher I do this.” Half the time, profs were students once too, they know how insane textbook and supply prices are now.
Then there’s the tiny, uneven side hustles that add up just enough. It’s not that cool influencer side hustle that makes you a thousand bucks a month. It’s selling your old annotated lecture notes to freshmen for $5 a set, like I did once after my freshman year, made enough to cover a new set of sketchbooks for my art elective. My roommate junior year needed a $300 drawing tablet for her graphic design classes, so she walked dogs for three different professors who lived off campus for a month and a half, one walk a day after her morning classes. She made exactly enough, but she had to skip her own study group the day before her midterm to cover a last-minute walk for a prof whose kid was sick, pulled an all-nighter to cram, and failed the first third of the exam. It worked out in the end, but it wasn’t some perfect, motivational story—she was cranky and stressed for a week after that.
Some people lean on family, but it’s not just “my parents bought it for me.” My cousin’s going to community college right now, she needed a new laptop last month because her old one died the night before classes started. Her birthday’s not until November, so she called her grandma and asked if she could get her birthday gift three months early, $300 for the laptop. Grandma said yes immediately, but my cousin felt so bad about it because grandma’s on a fixed social security check, so now she drives out to her house every other Sunday to mow the lawn and bake her chocolate chip cookies, even when she has a 10-page paper due that night.
I think the biggest secret no one tells new students is that most schools have these tiny emergency grants for exactly this stuff, that you don’t have to pay back. My friend Javi was in the nursing program, needed $250 for scrubs and a decent stethoscope before his first clinical rotation, and he had no idea this grant existed until one of his advisors mentioned it offhand. You just fill out a two-page form, explain what you need, and most of the time you get it if you’re low income. He told me he almost deleted the form before hitting send, because he had to write that he only had $12 left in his checking account that month, and it felt like putting all your messy business out there for strangers to see. But he got the money, and that was that.
I still remember meeting that senior for my first used laptop, her selling it to me for $200 on the campus Facebook swap group. I met her at a coffee shop off campus, counted out cash because I didn’t have enough in my Venmo balance, and I ended up one dollar short. I wanted to crawl under the table. She just laughed and waved me off, said it was fine, she just needed it gone before she moved across the country for a job. Threw in a free well-loved Harry Potter laptop case too.
Last time I was back at campus, I saw a freshman hovering by the door of that supply swap in the basement, staring at the stack of calculators like she was too scared to go in. I wanted to walk over and tell her that almost every student I know has been right where she is. No one walks into college with a budget big enough to buy every single thing brand new at full price. We all do the awkward, messy, small stuff to get by. I didn’t go over, though. I just got my coffee and left. Some things you just have to figure out on your own, I guess. It’s not pretty, it doesn’t make for a catchy social media reel, but it gets you through the semester. Most of the time, anyway.
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