So sorry. We're struggling financially too. Because of my BP, I can't work, and my husband lost several high paying jobs as a scientist as the government continued to cut and cut financing for NASA (he has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry). He is over-educated for most jobs. No one told him in graduate school that the manufacturing plants around here want chemical engineers (he says it would have been a change of just a few courses in grad school to get this degree, and he is super-smart; he could have done it). He got a Ph.D. from a Nobel prize winner (Rick Smalley, discoverer of the Buckey Ball, and big when nanotubes were first being engineered in the lab). But Smalley wasn't a great advisor, made his grad students compete for first author publications (in the university world, the publications other colleges care about are only 1st and last name publications, they don't care about the names in between). Even so, his grad school (Rice, in Houston) let him get a Ph.D. without a single first author publication. My graduate school (the University of Houston, much less prestigious than Rice) even made me have 1 first author publication on top of the thesis to get an M.S. For a Ph.D. you had to have 2-3 first author articles.

So now we're stuck in a situation where we can barely afford the mortgage (and our house is hardly extravagant as it was built in 1964), we've both got old cars, and God knows what is going to happen this year. Financial stress is AWFUL. My husband is a high school physics teacher; they pay him peanuts, the insurance sucks, I had a medical hospitalization, trauma surgery, hospital stay, numerous followups with a pricy gastroenterologist.

Yet...because my husband is a teacher (puts our income above poverty level) and I've hardly worked (other than the 2.5 years in grad school as an RA/TA), we can't get any financial aid. Sucks.