Being a college student can be quite expensive. With so many hidden fees that we have to deal with, along with those boba runs or weekend meals with friends on the ave adding up, making a little extra money on the side would be great for anyone. As a college student, it can be challenging to balance both school and a job, so if that is not possible for you, here are a few less time-consuming alternatives that you can turn to in your spare time.
Tutor Other Students
You may find that you excel at a certain subject or are doing well in one of your classes when your classmates are struggling. You also may have already taken the class, so you can help those who are taking it after you. Offering your time to other students and helping them understand the material at a reasonable rate is a great way to make a couple of extra bucks. You can either do this independently or work for a tutoring center. Drop-in Clue undergraduate student tutors at the UW are being paid at a rate of $16.72/hour for the 2020-2021 academic year. Even better, if you are a numbers wiz you can tutor at the math study center, where you will be paid $16.79/hr!
Sell Notes & Textbooks From Your Old Classes
Are you a good notetaker with beautiful angelic handwriting? Do you have textbooks that you barely even touched, but your professor still forced you to buy them? Then it would be a good idea to pass down your old class material to students who are now taking the class! This is similar to tutoring, but instead of committing to teaching the material, you are just giving other students helpful materials that will hopefully allow them to succeed.
Become a Residential Advisor
There are so many perks to being a RA. The most notable of them being free room and board! That means that you get to live on campus for free the whole year: talk about great savings. This role requires you to be a leader and provide emotional support to peers living in your community. Your job is to facilitate a positive learning environment, while also planning events that help foster a sense of community among residents. While maybe not possible if you are a freshman, be sure to consider an application for the next academic year.
Take Online Surveys
Online surveys are a great way to give feedback to brands that want to improve their products and services more towards what consumers want. Some websites you should check out: SurveyJunkie, Swagbucks, InboxDollars, EurekaSurveys. I have personally tried all of these websites, and they were very easy to use with the ability to cash out fairly quickly. For example on SurveyJunkie, you can cash out at a $5 minimum, and depending on your demographics, you can earn anywhere from $2.00 to $5.00 per hour doing online surveys. But doing surveys is not the only way to earn money on the site: you may also qualify for a focus group. I qualified for an hour-long focused group where I was compensated with a $100 amazon gift card. All of the other websites work great as well, with some offering games and videos for you to watch while you make a few cents here and there.
“The pandemic has been hard on me and my family. It affected many choices, like where to go for college and how am I even going to pay for college. Like many people’s mindset after high school graduation, I wanted to get a job. Well, with the luck of the Class of 2020, the coronavirus hit and put many people out of jobs, like my parents. I wanted to help them with paying for college, even if it was just little things like school supplies which would help a lot. I started by selling my knitting and crocheting: it was going somewhere, but my parents did not want to risk going out to mail the products I made, so I had to look for another way to make money. I googled, “Ways to make money during coronavirus”, and like a million results came up. I eventually started playing games for money like “Swagbucks Live”, a Trivia Game where you compete with other players for a share of the grand prize on weekdays. It only takes 15 minutes, so I was really into it.
Every penny counts during the pandemic. I later found other games like “SongPop Live”-it’s discontinued, now but I got like $20 playing that game for a few months. It was great. Of course, I tried to find more ways and discovered surveys you take for money like “SurveyJunkie” and “InboxDollars”. I prefer SurveyJunkie because of the looks and the fact that you can cash out at only $5. One time I got $15 in a week. It was pretty crazy. Overall, I used the money to buy things like pens, notebooks, body wash, you know all the things you need for school, just in case I went back. It helped my parents out since all they needed to pay for was rent. Of course, I had some money left on the side and spent it on things I like, such as Shawn Mendes’s merchandise as well as Team Rar.”
Hopefully, some of these methods helped you in the same way they helped Pam!