When Da sold his laptop, he was working toward his BA in social work with a full-time course load. “I always try to pay my bills myself, being a first-gen student,” he says. “I needed a large sum to pay off my car repair cost. It was like six hundred dollars. I didn’t have that, but I had my MacBook. It was a graduation gift from my dad. But to make ends meet for them, I sold it without telling him.”