Way back in Spring 2018, my second semester as a professor, I had a student—we'll call her Kelsey—take AWR 101 with me. I liked Kelsey a lot, she was smart and did the reading and had interesting things to say about it. Unfortunately, Kelsey failed the class; I forget exactly why now, but I think it was because she just didn't turn in a final paper.
That must have not scared her off, because Kelsey took me again in Spring 2019, for AWR 201, after filling her 101 credit with a community college course. Unfortunately, she failed again, because once again she did not submit a final paper. I got to know Kelsey more this semester. She had a job at a local amusement park, and one time she told me a story about how she missed the last bus home and the battery on her electric scooter was low, and she ended up having to walk from there back to her dorm, which took four hours... she made it home at 6am! I told her if she ever needed anything, she should call me.
She took me for AWR 201 again in Spring 2020. Unfortunately, Spring 2020 was a bad time to take classes if you struggled with school to begin with. She scraped through with a D, though.
That summer, I got an e-mail from her. "Do you remember how you said I should get in touch if I ever needed help?" it said. I called her back.
Unfortunately, Kelsey had fallen victim to a rental scam. She'd moved back home with her family once the pandemic began, but her plan was to move into an apartment that summer and resume her job at the amusement park. When her mother dropped her off at the apartment, the doors were all locked; the landlord apologize for never having sent her the keys, and told her that if she hired a locksmith, he'd reimburse her. A locksmith came, replaced all the locks, and then Kelsey's mother drove back home.
The next morning, the apartment's maintenance guy was very surprised to find someone living in an unoccupied unit.
It turned out there's a scam, where people from foreign countries will take a real apartment listing and duplicate it, pricing it just a bit lower. Then they make off with your deposit money and whatever else they can get while they string you along. The maintenance guy called the police; by the time I got there, this was all sorted out... but Kelsey had to go. So I rented a U-Haul, and we put some of her stuff in a storage unit she owned, and the bigger stuff in our garage, and Kelsey crashed with us for a few weeks until she was able to sort out a new living situation with some people she knew from school.
I periodically heard from her after that. Her grades got bad enough she had to drop out of school for a while while she worked to make money.
In Spring 2024, I got a cryptic text from her: "It turns out living outside isn't as romantic as I'd imagined."
She'd ended up in a spiral where she fell behind on car payments and lost her car, this meant she had a hard time keeping up with one of her part-time jobs and she lost it, but that meant she couldn't make rent, so she was evicted, and then she lived in a hotel until her savings ran out, so she checked her dog into daycare and spent the night trying to sleep in a park! This was January. I mean, we do live in Tampa, but it can still get pretty cold.
So once again, Kelsey crashed with us for a few weeks, until she was able to sort things out with her boyfriend in Missouri, and she headed off to live with him.
Unfortunately, he dumped her on Christmas. She made her way back to Florida, and we told her she could once again crash with us until she got back on her feet. She has family here in Florida, but does not get along with them very well.
What we did not expect is that she would end up living with us for a year! Kelsey's goal was to get a government job so that she could get back on her feet financially, but also get the benefit of free community college, so she could also get back on her feet academically and finally finish her degree. This took a long time. She was constantly applying to jobs, getting interviews sometimes, getting strung along by jobs that promised her good things that never materialized. She helped out around the house some, watched the kids occasionally, but mostly tried to stay out of our way, I think always feeling like she was imposing. She did eventually restart her job at the theme park for a little bit of money.
Finally, in Fall 2025, she got an offer and a real job! It took a while, but she finally got enough money to get a car... and got into an accident like a week a later. But while we were gone for Christmas, she moved into her new apartment.
It's been an interesting thing—I don't know that we've kept it secret, but we haven't gone out of our way to talk about it either, so few people in our lives really know about it. I am happy to finally get my office back! But also I worry about Kelsey; it seems to me she is very much an example of what people call the "precariat," just one bad day away from the edge. I hope she can get back on her feet, and I hope we've done our part to make that happen.
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