One hundred ninety dollars and eleven cents. PayPal says that is what two years of my college handwriting sold for, thirty-eight purchases, most of 'em to strangers taking Mechanical Engineering courses in states I have never driven thru. The account emptied to checking on March 31 for the last time. All fourteen bundles are delisted now, pulled on a Tuesday night while a takedown email sat open in the next tab, and I want to tell it in order, because the order is the whole story.
The notes themselves began as survival. I graduated in December 2023 with a Mechanical Engineering degree I earned mostly at a kitchen table between 10 PM and 1 AM, and the Thermo I notebook was the one I rewrote twice, 92 pages, margins full of things like DO THIS IN ORDER and THIS IS WHERE EXAM 3 LIVES. When I moved apartments that spring, the shoebox of notebooks rode on my lap the whole way. I was not sentimental about much from school. I was sentimental about those.
In August 2024, broke with $31,400 of student loans sitting in deferment, I scanned them and listed them. What followed was $3 at a time for two years, til a professor I never met used the word "mine" in an email and ended the whole thing in one paragraph.
the shoebox, scanned
Nine hours over a winter break, phone propped on a stack of cookbooks over each page, four hundred scans into a folder named notes_final_FINAL. I listed on Stuvia in August 2024: fourteen bundles, $4.99 to $7.99, one course each, every description honest about what it was, my handwriting, my mnemonics, my mistakes included. The first sale came September 19, 2024: Fluids, $4.99. Stuvia's cut was 30 percent, $1.50. PayPal took $0.46. Three dollars and three cents landed, and I texted my brother a screenshot like it was a lottery win. It was not a lottery win.
the slow drip
Two years of drip numbers. Thirty-eight sales, mostly Thermo I, some Heat Transfer, and a peculiar run of four Statics copies to the same university in October 2025, prolly one study group splitting a $6.99 decision. Best month: $26.97. Longest silence: nine weeks, no sales, no messages, nothing. Gross across two years: $190.11. The site's 30 percent: $57.03. PayPal fees ate another six and change. What actually reached me was about $127, spread across 38 notifications that each felt bigger than $3.03. Each one sat in my inbox next to the loan deferment emails, $3 at a time of evidence that the shoebox had value to somebody.
the email from Dr. Rehm
March 12, 2026, subject line thru the platform: "Copyright concern, Thermo I bundle." Dr. Rehm teaches Thermo I at a school I did not attend, on the other side of the country, and he had bought the bundle himself, which I did not know was possible, and attached the receipt. Pages 40 thru 58 of my scans included, copied by undergraduate me, the problem sets he wrote for his own course in 2018. His email was one paragraph and more polite than I deserved: my margin notes could be mine, the problem sets were not, and he would rather I take them down than file anything. He used the word "mine" twice.
forty-eight hours
I went and read the platform policy I had clicked past in 2024, the one about uploading only work you own, and he was right in every particular. Stuvia's takedown form removed the six bundles containing his problem sets within a day of my own request, no argument, no appeal, because there was nothin' to appeal. Eight bundles of pure lecture notes stayed listed. I sat with it for a week feeling mostly embarrassment, because I had honestly never reckoned of any of it as anyone's but mine.
what I kept, briefly
The eight clean bundles stayed up thru April and sold one more copy, $6.99, $4.89 of it mine. Then I pulled the rest in May anyways. The margins were pennies, the risk of a second email was not worth it, and the honest math had already stopped making sense. Final PayPal balance swept to checking: $133.08, dated May 2.
the hourly math
The audit, since spreadsheets are my day job now. Scanning: nine hours. Listing and writing descriptions: four. Answering buyer messages, and there were sixty-plus, mostly some version of "does this cover exam 3": fifteen. Call it twenty-eight hours for $133.08, which is $4.75 an hour, below every wage I have ever been paid, including the $17 internship, for money I was never entirely entitled to. The site's cut was the cheap part. The expensive part was one paragraph from Dr. Rehm.
back in the closet
The shoebox is back in the closet next to the cap and gown, and the folder on my drive is still named notes_final_FINAL, untouched since May. PayPal balance: zero. The margin notes were mine. The problem sets never were. That is it. That is the whole audit.
