Eighteen months in: two full-time remote roles and nine credits a semester. I'm sleeping about five hours, my grades have gone from A to B-minus, and the second job is the one paying tuition so dropping it defeats the point. Anyone who has run all three, what actually gave first and did you plan it or did it just collapse?
Going against the room a bit: I'd cut the second job, not the school, even though the second job pays tuition. Check whether either employer has tuition reimbursement first — mine covered $5,250 a year and I had worked there two years without knowing.
That one form covered most of what the second job was for, minus the 30 hours a week. Worth an email to HR before you restructure your whole degree.
Neither has it, I checked in month two. Job A is a 40-person startup and Job B is a contract shop, so there's no benefits programme at all on that side.
Fair enough, that kills that. Then I'd still argue the degree is the thing with a deadline attached and the contract is the thing you can restart later — contracts come back around, a stalled thesis mostly doesn't.
Do the hours honestly before you decide. Two full-time roles is 70 to 80 real hours if either has meetings, nine credits is realistically 27 to 30 including reading, and that is 100+ before you eat or commute anywhere. There are 112 waking hours in a week at 8 hours sleep.
So you are not choosing whether to cut something. You already cut sleep. The only question is whether you pick the next cut or your body picks it.
I did that arithmetic properly last night after reading this and it comes to about 104 hours before food, laundry or seeing anyone. Which explains the five hours of sleep — it isn't a discipline problem, there's nowhere else for it to come from.
That's the number to take into whichever conversation you have next, with a supervisor or a manager. It's much harder to argue with than 'I'm struggling'.
School slows down, jobs don't. Take fewer credits, keep both incomes, finish a year later. Nobody has ever asked me how long my degree took.
I let it collapse instead of planning it. Failed a core module in my third semester, which meant a retake, which meant an extra $2,100 and another four months. The failure came the week both jobs had quarter-end at the same time and I made a decision at 2am that I would not have made rested.
If you can see the pinch weeks on a calendar — and you can, they're the same weeks every term — decide now which one loses. Deciding in the moment is how I got the retake.
@weekend_margin · 3mo ago
I dropped to six credits and finished in three years instead of two. That was the whole fix and I resisted it for a year because it felt like failing.
What it actually bought me: one fewer assessment cycle per semester, so the weeks where a paper landed on top of a release stopped existing. Grades went back up, both jobs stayed fine, and the extra year cost me maybe $4k in tuition inflation. I'd pay that again to not repeat the eighteen months you're describing.
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