With the start of finals week, students are studying and losing way too many valuable hours of sleep. They’re contacting professors to try and raise an 89 percent to a 90, or asking to make up an old assignment. But a handful of students have evolved and have opted for a different approach to their future.

Freshman Alma Newman discovered one alternative to a good GPA last Saturday afternoon.

“I was really worked up about Dead Week, you know, and Finals Week, and financial aid,” she said. “So I went onto my Steam account to play some games, and I was messaging my friends about how stressed and broke I was.”

Suddenly, Newman’s inbox was flooded with games, gifted to her by her online companions. That’s when she realized there was potential in her situation. She started messaging more and more people, and successfully managed to get even more games sent to her inbox.

“All these people that I met through Steam were sending me games because I said I couldn’t afford them,” she said. “It’s mostly boys, you know, because they get all excited about gamer girls. But there were a few girls sending me things too. Some of those games were worth $20 or $30.”

Newman planned to use this ability to coax online gamers into sending her money as well as games. She stated that, because of this, she no longer had to worry about getting good grades. Since giving up her studying, Newman was able to get nearly nine hours of sleep a night, a 300 percent increase from before.

Other students have found similar means of making a sustainable living off monetary gifts from people online. SeekingArrangement.com is, according to the website, the “No.1 in sugar daddy dating” with “background-checked users” and was featured on Dr. Phil, Showtime and CNN. More than a few WSU students have capitalized on this valuable resource.

“There’s a lot of benefits to using SeekingArrangement in Pullman,” said Bernie Levine, a longtime user of the website. “Since we’re such a small town, most of the sugar daddies don’t live anywhere nearby. A lot of them will send money to your Venmo even if you just FaceTime them.”

Levine has had an account since 2014, and estimates that he has made nearly $14,000 on FaceTime meetups alone. “I don’t know why everybody doesn’t do this,” he said. “It’s practically paying for my tuition.”

Katya Milan is another student with a SeekingArrangement account, though she expressed some concern with the validity of the website. The premise is good enough, she said, but it does present difficulties that some prospective users might not be willing to deal with.

“The problem is about half the accounts aren’t real people, they’re bots,” Milan said. “So you might put a ton of work and charisma into convincing someone to send you money only to find out that it’s just a scam.”

Despite the epidemic of fake accounts, Milan still recommended students try it out or look for other ways to get money online.

“It’s a good gig even with the setbacks,” she said. “I haven’t worried about grades or finals or anything like that since I joined last semester, and I’ve had more time for self-care. I doubt I’ll ever go back to studying again.”

Anna Young is a freshman creative writing major from Helena, Montana. She can be contacted at [email protected].