Cancelling My Subscription

Well, that's certainly confusing. As suggested, you'll definitely have to go through Adobe customer support as we do not have any sort of account access. 

It sounds like you signed up for an annual subscription, which involves a penalty cancellation fee if you cancel it before the year is up. If you don't think that's what you have, you might try to sign in to your Adobe account and see what information it gives you.

>monthly subscription - using my college email in order to have the student discount

No, you do not have a monthly subscription with a student discount... the ONLY way to get a student discount is with an annual subscription, with either one annual payment or with monthly payments

To cancel without paying a penalty of 1/2 of the remaining annual balance you need to cancel during the final month of your year's agreement

Sounds complicated, all right. Unfortunately, this is a public forum, not Adobe support. Users, including the ACPs and MVPs, can't provide support for account, subscription, billing, download, or product activation issues. Support for those issues requires an Adobe employee.

Click the following to contact Adobe customer support staff for help: 

https://helpx.adobe.com/contact/support.html

You must be signed in with your Adobe ID and allow cookies in your web browser for this to work.

This is the link to the US website. If you are not in the US, the site should redirect to the page appropriate to the region associated with your ID.

Click the chat icon at the bottom right of the page to open a chat session. Typing AGENT into the chat window should connect you directly to a CSR rather than the AI. You will probably need to tell them to escalate to a supervisor, because your situation sounds like it will be beyond the training given tier 1 support. Good luck.