In that situation I would probably try to fill out the request form saying "Self Employed" and see where that takes me.
If that doesn't work or you get questions are uncomfortable answereing, then contact Mathworks Sales at <Product Support Page> and ask if you are eligible for a trial license. The Answers forum is not an official Mathworks site and respondents here have no authority nor power to help on such issues.
The alternative to learn something about how MATLAB works as a programming language would be to download and install Octave; it's a mostly "workalike" as far as base language features.
