Lucy Summers composed herself and pulled herself together.
To avoid another bad experience, she stopped applying for jobs online and started looking in person.
She got lucky. She interviewed for a cashier position at a supermarket and was hired on the spot.
The pay was 3,500 a month during the trial period and would go up to 4,000 once she was a permanent employee. Most importantly, room and board were included.
Lucy Summers was thrilled. That very day, she moved out of the messy youth hostel and into the supermarket's employee dormitory.
The next day, she went to the supermarket to complete her onboarding paperwork and officially became another beast of burden, toiling just to get by.
From that day on, she was no longer a student.
The day she got paid, she paid off her overdue loan, sent a thousand back home, and kept only two hundred for herself.
Her high school classmates were all sharing their new lives at university on their social media feeds.
