I was depressed, but still aware enough to consider meeting with a counselor. Only, I thought Pitt’s psychological services were just available for what I assumed were real emergencies. Feeling depressed was normal in the first semester, I thought. My depression didn’t qualify, I believed. So I never did try to make an appointment with a mental-health professional.

A 2012 National Alliance on Mental Health survey of college students showed that roughly one in four students suffer from depression or some other mental illness during their time in college. Yet 50 percent of those coping with depression and other issues do not seek “mental-health services and supports.” For the 50 percent who do solicit services, their awareness about their illness and peer support are among the keys to recovery. I only recovered because I refused to lose my scholarship. That, and a commitment to befriending adult learners and graduate students my second semester, made a difference. I managed to make the dean’s list my second semester, and finished my freshman year with a 3.02 GPA.

The biggest test was still to come, though. I had missed the March 15 deadline to put down a $350 deposit to guarantee a dorm room for my sophomore year. I had asked my parents for help. But my mother could only stretch $850-a-month of welfare, food stamps, and vouchers so far. And while my father said that he had wired me the funds via Western Union, he never actually sent the money. I knew at the end of the spring semester that I would have to go back to New York, find work for the summer, and make enough money to find a place in Pittsburgh in the fall. In retrospect, I recognize that I should have contacted a Pitt administrator about my situation, but I had no idea at the time whom I should reach out to.

Nothing worked out that leap year the way I thought it would. I found myself unemployed for the summer and homeless in Pittsburgh for five days. Three of those five nights I spent on a concrete landing in a stairwell on campus in what is now Wesley Posvar Hall before I found a room to rent in a rowhouse for $140 a month. My father did give me $400 the week before, which I used to secure my 200-square-foot room. I shared a bathroom and a kitchen, but it was better than my previous residence. To be back in Mount Vernon with my mother, my abusive stepfather, and my five siblings in a two-bedroom apartment would have been a death sentence to my higher-education efforts. According to data from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, there are at least 58,000 homeless college students in the U.S. Not knowing where to turn for help and the isolation that comes with no physical address was a problem for me, and remains an issue for so many others.

I was lucky that my bout with homelessness lasted less than a week. But I still had to go through the fall 1988 semester with just $205 left over from my financial-aid package and little or nothing to eat, except tuna-fish sandwiches and pork neck bones and rice.