A question for grad students......

[chrisdhal]

My employer is paying for mine.

[Patrick del Poker Grande]

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pretty bad, but hopefully if I land a public interest job and the state still has money, they'll reimburse my tuition.

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Do they really reimburse after the fact? I mean, I know they'll pay for you to go to school, provided you have an agreement with them at the time, but will they be willing to just put up a bunch of cash after you've already 'paid' for it and you essentially have no leverage on them to pay it?

[poincaraux]

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Bioinformatics.

I've had jobs working in the labs and internships out the waazooo. My resume could not look better right now. Still, I didn't find out about graduate assistantships till very late in the game.

Right now I'm a little over $70K in debt.

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Ouch. Standard procedure here (biophysics, chemistry, bioinformatics, ecology/evolutionary biology, etc.) is to get yourself on an NIH training grant early on and maybe get your own funding later on. Failing that, the professors will usually write you into a grant. Everybody does a few semesters of teaching and/or graduate assistantship-ing along the way as well.

Seriously, it sounds like the person in charge of organizing your department is doing a bad job here. Especially in something like bioinformatics where there's plenty of grant money to go around.

On the bright side, you have a good resume and you're about to be done with the accumulating-loans phase.

[wacki]

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Seriously, it sounds like the person in charge of organizing your department is doing a bad job here.

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Yes very bad. I really did get screwed on this one.

[Girchuck]

Zero debt
They actually pay me to do the research and cove the tuition

[fluff]

Not [censored] at all. I have a full RA that pays for my tuition, a decent stipend and health insurance, paying me basically for doing research I need to do anyway (and/or for surfing 2+2). Thank you federal gov't.

[phage]

It is not up to the administrators to push the students. Most administrators will certainly facilitate things but it usually up to the student and the PI to write the grant. That said most grad schools pay their students (and tuition is deferred).

[gvibes]

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I wracked up about 60K in loans. I am paying them off at 3% (!!!!!!) over 30 years, so I don't think I am screwed in the least.

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This is why you SHOULD take the loans, even if you have the money. The interest rate is like 1.5% now. Leave your money in stocks, bonmds, funds, whatever. It'll probably do much better than 1.5%.

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The consolidation rates go up to 4.8 or so, like, tomorrow.

[gvibes]

>130, all from law school.

I had an offer to stay in scenic Champaign, get a masters (CompE) for free, and get paid something like 1500/month (which in the land of 300 apartments is a huge sum), but I decided to work instead.

EDIT: I suppose I should add that my total debt is roughly equal to my starting salary, so no regrets.

[wacki]

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>130, all from law school.

.....

EDIT: I suppose I should add that my total debt is roughly equal to my starting salary, so no regrets.

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I hate you.

j/k