graduate school – After years of shifting careers and working low-paid education support jobs, a mother in her 40s used freelance writing earnings to avoid taking on new student loan debt—then finished a master’s in education debt-free and moved into teaching in 2022.
When she walked her son into kindergarten, the moment hit with clarity: the elementary school world was where she belonged. The feeling was real, but the timing was brutal. She was already juggling young kids and full-time work. and heading back to school—especially with student loan debt she couldn’t afford—was not an option she wanted to face again.
Her path to that decision started decades earlier. After high school, she enrolled in college as a drama major with dreams of heading to Hollywood. When the major didn’t match what she hoped, she switched to English. In high school, she’d earned straight As in English, so the pivot felt natural. It didn’t take long for the questions to follow: people kept asking what she planned to do with a liberal arts degree.
The answers didn’t feel comforting. She was told she could go into publishing. but her professor warned she’d be “dirt poor” and living in a hovel in New York City—at least at first. Teaching came up again and again, but she said she had zero interest then, and it required more schooling. Like many people in their 20s, she floundered—moving from job to job, trying to figure out where she fit.
Her work history carried her through roles that never quite felt like a mission. She worked as a waitress and a chiropractic assistant before she found herself “dropped smack dab into corporate America.” Her stints included office management. webinar coordination. and marketing. Each day came with the same quiet question as she sat at her desk: whether she was “contributing to humanity in any way.”.
Eventually, she returned to education anyway—but not in the way she expected.
A decade later. she was working in the school system as an educational technician. or “ed tech. ” essentially a teaching assistant. Special education became her niche, in part because so few people wanted to substitute in that area. That experience made the transition to special education ed tech feel natural.
The problem was money. Ed techs made very little, she said. If she wanted to make a living as a teacher, she would have to go back to school. But she couldn’t take the risk again. She was already carrying large debts from her undergraduate degree in English and her first master’s in television/video production. and she was still paying them off in her 40s. With four kids at home, she said the math didn’t work for taking on more debt.
Her district agreed to help—but only up to a point. The district would pay for three of the 10 classes required to earn her master’s in education. She tried anyway, but when she did the math, she saw it wouldn’t work. The extra burden of loans was something her family couldn’t manage. so she kept plugging away without a clear plan for how she’d pay for the second master’s.
It was the side gig that changed the equation.
She had always loved writing, but she described herself as someone who didn’t care much for writing non-fiction. Her shift started when she built a following through a blog about parenthood. She began freelancing in 2014 after learning to pitch. It was slow at first—she sold one essay, and that led to another.
Then the pandemic arrived, and the freelance income surged relative to her full-time work. She said her freelance writing income almost matched her full-time ed tech pay. She wrote about parenting, childhood, and lifestyle topics, and she had to learn how to move into reported pieces. Still, her English degree—finally—was paying off.
That realization brought her back to the tuition problem she couldn’t solve.
With the freelance earnings, she saw she could fund the seven classes her district didn’t cover. She saved enough to pay her tuition through planning and consistency. She started her master’s program in 2019 and finished it in 2021 debt-free.
Finishing without loans, she said, was “an amazing feeling.” She began working as a special education teacher in 2022, and she said she loves it.
Now she’s looking further ahead—hoping to get her Ph.D. in education.
“Funny how sometimes, the things you promise you’ll never do become the ones that matter most — and the ones you work the hardest for,” she said, reflecting on how her life kept pulling her back toward teaching, even after years of insisting she wouldn’t.
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