Soon2bgrad

You should be eligible for federal direct loans that are in addition to any other financial aid (and other types of loans) and those can cover up to the estimate cost of living expenses that the school sets. Ask your financial aid officer about it, but it should be included in your financial aid package. I also would advise against taking out private loans. Private loans often don't offer a grace period or deferrals for financial hardship if something happens when you are paying them back and you are unemployed for a period of time for some reason.

Exactly. You should be applying to jobs that require your education, recruiters for jobs that require a lower level of education will assume you are just biding time until you get a job you are qualified for and will jump ship.

I am very worried about how I am going to transition financially between PhD and my first paycheck from a "real" job. I have been doing a phd full time so obviously I have basically no savings and as soon as I defend I will have no more money coming in. I am looking for ideas on ways I can get some money coming in for possibly a month to maybe three months of being post-PhD unemployed. This is scary. If anyone has any stories about how they made the financial transition from PhD to real paying work (whether they were waiting for a post doc to start or looking for a job outside academia), I would greatly appreciate it!

Yikes, if you are doing Epi your quant score is going to be very important. When the person who is reviewing a giant pile of applications for a math heavy program like epi, GRE scores are going to be an easy way to cut that pile down. Unless you have excellent math scores from undergrad and are just a bad test taker, do your hardest to bring that score up.