Creative Ways to Make Money?

Dorkman

That title sounds so bad....

In a couple weeks I will be embarking on a mission to change the direction of my career and go back to school (Mechanical Engineering Technology)

Either way, I expect to see some debt. I am prepared to eat the debt of tuition and books and what not, but I want to help mitigate the costs of living and what not. With everything being considered I am looking to try and make about $400 a month and am having issues trying to find this cash.

I could take a regular part time job, but at this point school is the upmost importance. I want nothing to really take my time away from studying as I hope to set myself up for some scholarships in the next year. So working a bunch of hours flipping burgers is of no interest to me.

Tomorrow I plan on pursueing the school looking for a TA job, perhaps marking projects in the field I have my original bachelor from. But beyond that I am a bit out of ideas.

Donating plasma is not an option as I am Canadian, thus I guess I am expected to donate it for free.

FeatherBlade

Are you going to school in Canada or the US?

If you have stuff laying around the house, sell it.

Grizzled

Since you already have a BA in another subject, maybe tutoring? It's not really any more fun than flipping burgers, but it should pay better and be way more flexible (in that you can just do a few hours here and there per week).

Do you qualify for work-study (or is there a Canadian equivalent)? A lot of those jobs consist of doing pretty much nothing with your textbook open in front of you, so that could be good if you get the right position.

Depending on where you are going to be, you could also try offering your services to parents of high-school kids. In some places parents will pay pretty outrageous sums to have their kids tutored by experienced academic people - "got my BA and going back for a second in Engineering" might serve as some good qualifications.

Some more ideas from when I was really poor:

Most universities have a constant need for people to participate in psych experiments, that can be good for 10-20 dollars here and there for pretty minimal effort. I don't know about everywhere else, but Stanford has an online system where you put in your characteristics (gender, age, race, handedness, etc.) and they e-mailed you a notification for every study you qualified for. But you could also just check by the Psych department every week, or look for fliers around campus.

Sometimes in the ETC/part-time list on Craigslist there are people looking for someone to do a one-off task for cash in hand; I find that trolling these is more effort than it's worth because most of them are some kind of scam or cover for something else, but a couple of times I managed to get $50 or so for something like "help me load this heavy object into my car and unload it again somewhere else because I have no friends". This is probably more for when you are desperate (I was), but YMMV.

If you live somewhere with a lot of snow, on winter mornings after hard snow I would walk around with a shovel and offer to shovel people's cars out. Charge a flat rate and then get good at doing it fast - we did $20 a car split between two guys. Again, nice because you can quit whenever you get bored/tired/have enough money for the day.

The one thing you want to avoid is all those "work from home on your own schedule!"/"reps with sales ability needed for growing business!" type ads, because they are all scamtastic pyramid schemes that will cost you money rather than make it.

Rhesus Positive

I'll second the psych guinea pig suggestion - I used to get MRI scans while listening to words and pressing buttons. It wasn't regular work, but when it got close to the end of term being able to earn £30 for lying in a tube was a godsend.

You might be too moral for this one, but there are a fair few websites who pay for essays.

My first job out of university was casual telemarketing work - you turned up for the shifts that you wanted, and get paid minimum wage plus a small amount of commission. If you could find a place like that, you might be able to work a couple of shifts a week. I don't know how common those types of places are, though.

Dorkman

Ahh, I guess I got slighty distracted from this thread. I suppose that may happen when your a week without a computer.

Good suggestions thus far, unfortunatly I don't know how many will actually work.

I am going to a Community College in Eastern Canada. I have inquired with the school about TAs and what not and was quickly shot down, as it seems anyone who is working at the school is on a work term. I guess that way it's further government subsidized.

Furthermore, as it is a small college, there is not psych department ot take advantage of, furthermore the actual University in this town is a bit too far away for my fat ass to pedal too. (Need to sell the truck for some money)

I will look into tutoring as they do seem to have that around, furthermore I guess I will just skim want ads for any job I can find that is non too involved. It seems this program is going to be insansly intensive, so I don't know how much time I will have for a legitimate job.

Guess that just means it's time to find an illegitimate one!

:winky:

Any more suggestions?