Sounds like it's been the perfect time for some time off for you!
Plenty of time to put that qualification to use later on.
I just checked out hub pages, looks interesting.
I'm mainly thinking FFS why hasn't Hive got marketing like this?
I also note that if those authors featured are the highest earners (which they probably are) then they're getting a pretty crap cut from the ads).
Hubpages is working for me slowly. I wrote so many good articles for steemit that are going to waste now I'm actually just transferring those so not a lot of work. I'm also using old college papers that are wasting away on my laptop. Hubpages you get terrible ad revenue rates but if you write an article popular enough you'll earn a passive income for years off of it. I have 2 articles I've earned $50 every 2 to 3 months for five years now because they get a lot of views. One is a copycat recipe to a restaurant that goes viral on facebook around when the Super Bowl happens every year because it's a popular food then so I earn even more around that time.
In the past month I'd added 30 old steemit articles and they are all getting fairly good traffic to start off with so it'll be interesting to see how it goes. They also allow amazon affiliate links in your articles and I've had some people buy high priced tablets so I've gotten a good amount of product placement money at times. I don't have my own blog so hubpages is kind of a good starting place while I teach myself how to make money blogging.
Well it sounds like you've got the potential to up that to a couple of hundred dollars which is well worth it.
If you're going to set up you're own blog I'd recommend making it very focused, say on one academic area - or subject rather and stick with that, Google likes concentrated topics.
I uses WP.com and just pay the annual subscription which is around $250 a year, worth it for me.
I sell my own resources off the back of it.