I was awarded $1 million in scholarships to NYU. I also sacrificed a lot of my teenage life to get there.

When I was 18, local headlines and social media posts about me all focused on the exact same number: I was accepted into more than 20 colleges and offered over $1 million in combined scholarship funding.

I'm sure that to people reading the news, that seven-figure total sounded like a lottery win. What the headlines missed was the invisible labor it took to get there.

People saw the final funding amount. They didn't see the unpaid late-night hours I worked every single night, completely on my own, just to afford my future.

I grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, determined to become the first person in my family to graduate from college. My goal was to study film and television at New York University. Getting accepted was one hurdle, but figuring out how to pay for it was the real wall.

My family did not have extra money for tuition, and my mom had never navigated higher education. When I asked for help at school, my guidance counselor had no answers for an out-of-state dream. On top of that, I was trying to figure this out during the COVID-19 pandemic, isolated at home and staring at confusing college portals, financial aid pages, and scholarship search engines I had never seen before.

Nobody explained how to navigate the Common App, the single online application platform that allows students to apply to hundreds of different colleges at once. Nobody showed me how to find legitimate scholarship databases or how to request application fee waivers, so I wouldn't go broke just applying. Having internet access gave me a starting point, but it didn't give me a map. I realized early on that if I didn't hunt down the answers myself, nobody was going to hand them to me.

High school schedules are already full. My days consisted of seven hours of school followed by homework. After that came my responsibilities at home: since age 10, I had been helping care for my grandmother and my disabled uncle while my mom worked two jobs to pay our bills.

Between classes, schoolwork, and family caretaking, my daily bandwidth was entirely tapped out. But I couldn't afford to wait for a miracle.

Starting in my junior year and carrying straight through senior year, my second shift began the moment my family went to sleep. From 11 p.m. to 3 a.m., I managed college portals, tracked deadlines on spreadsheets, searched for scholarships, and drafted essay after essay.

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The hardest part wasn't keeping track of dates on a spreadsheet. It was learning how to write about myself for an audience while building a strategy from scratch.

Because I was applying mostly out-of-state, I couldn't rely on local state grants. Instead, I had to secure the maximum federal financial aid I could through the FAFSA, hunt down fee waivers to eliminate costs across more than 20 colleges, scour online databases for independent corporate grants, and apply directly to universities for institutional merit and need-based packages.