Grad school pontification

I started my classes at Towson in the middle of May and didn't pay for them until this week. The bill was due on June 21, but I didn't have enough money then, and I spent the rest of the summer scraping up some money to pay for the classes and finally tried to do it on Tuesday. I was going to pay cash for about 2/3 of my $2000 bill, and put the rest on a credit card that I have 0% interest for until December.

However, the system wouldn't let me do this, so I called the Bursar's Office. Well, not only did I have to pay my summer bill, but I also had to pay my fall bill - despite the fact that classes don't start until August 28. Oops. I figured I would be paying that bill in the middle of the semester, just like the summer bill. Nope. I told her that I couldn't do that, and explained that I don't get paid again until September, and she gave me an extension again and let me pay my summer bill. I probably could take out student loans, but don't want to - I'll already be paying off the $34,000 I have for the next decade or so. I get 75% reimbursement for the courses from the city, so hopefully that money will come back to me before the credit card starts bringing up interest.

Now, I have to decide whether to try to take two classes or drop one of them. I have a class called Secondary Curriculum Development, and I looked up the Professor, and she has an English Education background and has taught at the University of Maryland as well as Towson, so I think I really want to keep that one, which meets 4:30-7:00 on Mondays. The other one is Research in Education, which meets on Wednesdays from 5:00-7:30. It's my second research course, and the first one was not very time-consuming, so I might be able to do both.

It's going to be a challenging year, and I'm not sure if I should add a brutal class schedule to it. However, I have four more classes to take and am doubting the ability to take one in the spring while coaching, and really want that raise by next school year. That could leave me with one in the fall and three in the summer... not something I want to do, necessarily, especially because there's no guarantee at all that I'll be able to get into the classes I need in the summer.

I think I've decided to go to both classes during the first week and assess the work loads in each, and then probably drop one of them, and that one will probably be the Research course.