I’m Kristen. I’m a first-generation college student and mom of two awesome kids. I’m a business woman and a student at Harvard Extension School. I became an entrepreneur so I could figure out how to pay for school. I’ve been trying to figure that out since I was eighteen.
I got into Columbia at seventeen. Freshman year felt magical. I remember walking down the steps of Low Library after class, feeling like everything I’d ever wanted was finally happening. By sophomore year I was working two jobs and walking an hour to campus because I couldn’t cover the subway fare. I sat in on faculty seminars mostly for the free sandwiches. It wasn’t sustainable. I got so depressed. I withdrew before the year ended.
No one in my family understood what a private university actually costs. I didn’t know how to ask for help. I didn’t know that if I asked for help, there might have been grants or scholarships I could have applied for. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and it buried me.
Then came about ten years of starting over.
I enrolled at CUNY whenever I could scrape tuition together. I lost pregnancies. I opened a bar and nightclub in Brooklyn called Basquiat’s Bottle in 2016 and closed it in 2024. That was an amazing period of my life. I got sick — a chronic illness that dropped me from 160 pounds to 90 in three months.
I had two kids.
Becoming a mom re-ignited my desire to go to school. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. I realize that after all the miscarriages, I’d almost given up the idea of having children, but once I did have them, I started to think about all the other ambitions I’d quietly given up on, stuck in a drawer somewhere, and told myself, “That’s not for you anymore.”
But it is.
I desperately want to finish college and not go broke in the process.
I’m trying to navigate being a mom, an entrepreneur, and a student all at the same time, and with the financial climate of 2026, sometimes it feels like I’ll never get my bachelor’s degree.
I know it’s possible.
I’ve watched women with less time and less money than me walk across that stage. I’ve seen other women do it, but I think the best thing I can do for myself and everyone around me is to not only live my dream but write the steps of how I got there so that other people don’t have to stress like I’m stressing right now to figure out how to pay for college.
When I tried to fund school as an adult, what I found was outdated scholarship lists and advice directed towards parents trying to put their 18-year-old through college. Every post seemed to assume that I was that was that 18-year-old, and I had nothing but time. Nobody was writing for the woman Googling “scholarships for single moms” at midnight after the kids are asleep. No parents to call. No guidance counselor. No blueprint.
That’s the reason I’m building Get Funded HQ. I think of this as digital mentorship. I am making the thing I wish someone had handed me: a plain, practical guide to finding money for school when you’re doing it on your own. You can go back without going broke or losing your mind in the paperwork, and you don’t need anyone’s permission to do it.
Very slowly, one class each semester at a time, I am making progress. It’s taking longer than I ever thought it would, but here I am. I’m at Harvard Extension School studying data science and math, 84 credits in, raising a six-year-old and an infant. None of it was a straight line. And that’s okay. I give myself grace.
Here you’ll find scholarship guides written for adult and nontraditional students, essay writing tips, tuition strategies, the books I’d recommend you read about the college process, scholarships, financial aid, and just overall good finance advice.
I developed some tuition planning tools and a scholarship tracker to help you stay on task and meet your deadlines.
I wrote a seven-day sprint to get you started.
It comes to you free when you subscribe.
Personally, my life can be a little chaotic, juggling all of the balls in my universe. But I’m somebody who thinks in systems. I tried to turn my chaos into systems that other people can use, people just like me managing school on top of jobs, kids, and everything else.
All of it comes from having lived it, not from theory.
I write the way I’d talk to you if you were sitting across from me saying “I want to go back to school, but I have no idea where to start.” I’d hand you a plan.
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If you want the spreadsheet I built for this — the Scholarship Search Log, Deadline Tracker, Award Comparison Tool, and Essay Prompt Bank, all in one — and it is the system I wish someone had handed me at Columbia.
-Kristen Amendola founder of Get Funded HQ