vannik

So 4 very goods, with 4 1st author publications, awarded other fellowships, ect. Nothing telling me anything negative other than "It will be helpful to this applicant if he could format his proposal better so that the intellectual merit of his work can be made clearer." not very helpful. This was my first and only shot at this (I have funding through a research grant either way). I think possibly that my research topic isn't "hot" and it's why I wasn't considered for further review? It seemed like one of the people reading my proposal didn't really understand antennas. :wink:

I got 4 very goods. But the guy mis-interpreted my antenna research and equated the research to "The described project seems to have a relatively narrow scope based on impedance matching." which doesn't make sense in the context he read it. Matching antennas is important, and the crooks of antenna design. He obviously had no clue what frequency independent antennas are about and the practical problems associated with them.

No, I understand you will be making low income as a government person. I am saying $242k salary to pay back $130k is grossly overestimated Nothing to do with Harvard, just that. That is all I'm saying. The OP never specified how much he/she would make, and I saw those giant salaries being backed and people saying $200k or more for that. If the OP thinks that is true, it's not. If the OP has connections or two jobs or is marrying someone who's making more money then maybe they could pay it back if their joint income was on the order of $100,000? Do you know if the OP is married, or if they know someone to get a nice job straight away after school? Please stop trying to put words in my mouth, read jordan's post. You are the troll for not reading what I am saying DONT TAKE OUT 130K IN LOANS TO GO TO HARVARD UNLESS YOU WILL MAKE ENOUGH MONEY. 50,000 = Can't afford to pay it back. THAT LOAN CALCULATOR IS WRONG TO ASSUME YOU NEED TO MAKE 242,000 TO PAY 130k BACK IN LOANS AND LIVE COMFORTABLY. You think I'm not agreeing with you, which is absolutely wrong. You just refuse to read the math I wrote and to understand that I'm correct for disputing the $200k/year salaries that were mentioned at the head of this thread. End. Stop posting. We both agree that unless the OP has some way to mitigate loans (rich spouse, money in the family, ect) that it's a bad idea to do it solo. None of us know the situation, so I said what the typical income would be to pay back that amount and be comfortable. P.S. insulting me again for you not clearly understanding the point of my posts, like jordan so CLEARLY illustrated . . . you should look in the mirror. He can understand what I'm saying, apparently you can't, or refuse to. Math is hard, I know. . .

Again: someone posted $242k to pay back X debt. My point is to prove that wrong, which I did many times. In regards to the mortgage crisis, many people have tried to spread themselves too thin and get rejected from mortgages. . . the government mandated that banks make it easier for people to apply to get a mortgage. You could get up to 70% of your income in mortgage debt two years ago. This obviously doesn't make sense, but was allowed. Read about the differences in mortgages and student loans. Also, do you think a website can honestly give you a cookie cutter response for every situation? I knowingly took $130k in loans because I know I can pay it back with my degree. Again, my point was to correct Math123 and the other guy who said that this ammount of debt would not be able to be paid off with less than $200k/year. That is all, account deleted. I cannot understand why this has been so confusing or why you all need to mock me for being a foreign national who is trying to make it in America. Thank you.

I was offered a job at $75,000 with a bachelors. The average salary of my field PhD is around 6 figures, so yes, i do expect that. I also expect people who don't read posts to not bother replying. How disrespecful is that? The whole point you were trying to make is exactly what I was saying. If you have low income don't take a huge debt out. That's exactly correct. But you government types found the need to say I would need to make $242,000 to pay back my debt, which is just stupid and wrong. I can't fathom how you got a degree with your attitude and lack of reading comprehension. Uh. yeah, you're a moron. Speaking of being inept and disrespectful, I am glad you think that $72,000 salary (what I will be left with after I pay student loans, which are too high to pay back WITH INTEREST!!! RUN AWAY!) for a 26 year old single person isn't THAT bad to live off of. I know, it'll be a struggle, especially since it's about $30k higher than your salary. But yeah, I'm stupid for taking out loans. Please refrain from posting if you're too arrogant to read something that proves you're being stupid. *edit: DefinitelyMaybe will be the person who buys a house for $200,000 and goes under due to mortgage and upkeep costs. Marry rich, or never own a home.

Ok, lets stop talking about language and focus on the point that Math123 and Definatelymaybe is missing from the purpose of my original posts. I will have $130k in loans by the time I complete a degree program which I shall have a starting salary of $100,000. My take home salary which is assumed to be close to 65% of the gross income will be: more than $5,400 a month. With your stupid calculator that you so blindly used, If my loans were $1,600 a month; I'd be left with $3800 a month for food, rent, cellphone, car, and beer. Lets say all those bills add up to $2,000 (which is very high) I'd have $1,800 left to spend on things I do not need. How is this not capable of paying back that loan? Why does your calculator say I need $242,000 to pay back $1,600 comfortably? It's because they are not assuming you are making a large sum of money. Obviously if you make $40,000 a year you cannot handle a $1,600 a month loan. If you make $100,000 you can. I have many pharmacist friends who are doing this and living better than the majority of the people in this country. Math123, if you HONESTLY think that you need to make $242k a year to pay $19,200 a year back in loans, you are saying that no one in this country can live comfortably, or survive for that matter, with less than $126,000 in TAKE HOME SALARY. Again, I reiterate, with your blind faith on that calculator, to pay back $1,600 a month you would require a gross monthly salary of $20,166. A take home salary of $12,100. A spendable income after loan payment of $10,500. In my opinion, if you made $242,000 a year, you could probably pay $8,1000 a month on student loans and pay rent and live with the remaining $4,000 quite comfortably. This means you'd be paying back 40% of your gross salary to your loan debt, which is 5 times more than that stupid calculator you are using. Please, before you spout off nonsense realize that people who have the intelligence to get advanced degrees in engineering know how to do basic algebra. If you do not think $4,000 a month in take home salary is enough to live off of, or you yourself spend more than $1,000 a week between your non-student loan based bills (i.e. rent, food, car, ect) then it is not ME who you should be worried about. Do the math before you repost. Read my math before you repost. Please tell me where my math is incorrect, other than reading "You should not go over 8% of your gross for student loan debt." That is a good rule of thumb, but if you could make a million a year, i'm sure you'd take out a $250,000 debt because it'd be trivial to pay back, when one makes that kind of money. Edit: This is without adding the 30% tax refund you get for paying your student loans back. So, $1,600 a month payment would net you $5,760 back come tax time, which can be rolled back into your student loan payments.

This is why I thought it was a good idea to say something. You had three posts saying that one must make $200,000 a year to pay $1,600 a month back on a $130,000 loan and live comfortably. That is saying that one must take home $7,800 a month after taxes to live comfortably. Nowhere in this post did someone mention that the career was going to be making a specific value. I just assumed if the number of $242,000 was being thrown around, $100,000 might not be out of the question. My point was to demonstrate how these three posts were incredibly inaccurate and that one can live comfortably with that amount of student loan debt and be taking home a salary of $100,000, which happens to be almost 60% less than the value first used to try to sway the judgment of the OP.

Please try communicating in Korean sometime (and I'm an engineer)! Sorry for the messages, I just wanted to correct some very bad mathematics. I will refrain from posting here any longer.

My writing is nonsense? Ok. Worst way to pay off a loan is paying your highest interest loans first? Ok. You don't understand how you don't need 200,000 a year to pay 1600 a month? Ok. You also don't understand that $7200 a month take home salary might be slightly above the poverty line? Ok. A senior VP of a large financial estabilishment also mentioned that paying the minimum on you 5.5% loans and maximum on your 9% loans was the best way to pay back your debt. If you don't believe this fine, but I did the math, as well as take the advice of a man who makes more money in a year than I'll make with a PhD in 20 years. Paying the minimum is good because your payments are spread across EACH LOAN EQUALLY. You pay a % of every loan equally. So you pay 5% of each loan so after you're done paying the standard way your lender wants you to, you pay off all your high interest loans at the same time as your low interest. Dragging out the payment 10 years lowers your monthly payment that gets divided equally ALLOWING YOU TO PAY THE DIFFERENCE ONTO YOUR MAX INTEREST LOAN. So you pay the same ammount per month that you would have if your loans were over 10 less years, just killing off higher interest loan first. If you don't understand this, that's fine. Sit down with someone who's good with numbers and do it yourself. If you don't want to believe me, spend more money than you need to to pay back your debt. Just note: I'm not saying to pay the minimum over the longest ammount of time, like you wrote. I'm saying when you do that, you pay an extra large some of money (about 45% of your minimum more) and make sure you apply that to your highest interest loan. That money gets placed against the principle of your highest interest loan, making the money you are spending hit the principle of the higher interest loans before the lower interest, saving you money.

If you take out money through sallie-mae even the private loans fall under the umbrella of deferment. You get 36 months of "hardship" where you can deffer your loans. You'd rather pay off private loans first, if you have both private and gov't, even with your example. Maybe you mis-read what I said? If you must have loans and pay them back, you want to pay the minumum required that gets spread across all your loans, and then maximize your payment on the private ones to get rid of them faster since they have a higher interest rate, ect. If you read the thread, people said you would need a job over 200,000 to pay 1600 a month in student loans. I have no clue how much the job the person will obtain will pay, I'm just saying that the numbers flying around this thread are incredibly inaccurate. Granted 130,000 in debt fo a job that pays 50k is not going to work, but going 130k for a job that pays 100k would not be that bad at all. You just need to be smart. Once you get a job you should save 6 months worth of rent and bill paying regardless of your field incase of a layoff. The person should do a comparison of estimated income vs. loans and savings instead of reading people's shady math and taking it for fact like many of the people reading this have.

And the 40k/year example 8% gross salary pay back: Take home: 2166 a month. 8% gross income loan is $267/mo. left with $1900. Take the 100k/year and 1600/mo pay back (19.2% gross salary pay back) for 40K/year salary: Take home: 2166 a month. 19.2% gross income loan is $640/mo Left with 1526/mo. This would be very hard to live off of. That tool is to help people who don't understand math and the "average income" person be able to figure out their student loan debt. 80% of 1mil a year to pay back in loans would leave you with plenty of money to live off of. Hope this made sense to some people.

I don't understand why people think a $1600 a month student loan would be impossible if you were making $100,000. Assume take home of 5500 a month. . . can you not survive off of 3900? I survive off $1340 take home a month. $1,000 a week isn't bad. It's equivalent to someone making $72k a year. And this is assuming you set your payments over 10 years, which would be a bad idea. FYI background in this is I was a first generation college student and signed up for 5 years at a private university. Private loan bill is about 80k. My payment would have been $1250 a month after I finished undergrad. The best way to pay back a large loan is to spread out the payment to as long as you can and pay the minimum. Then, with the remaining money you were to pay over ten years (Say 10 years was 1600 a month and 25 years was 1000 a month) you take 600 and put it towards your highest interest private loan and kill that first. You don't want 1600 getting spread between private and gov't loans. Min on gov't max on private. P.S. Once you make enough money to pay your basic bills, everything else is gravy. If I had 200k job bringing home 11000 a month, and 3200 on loans, you'd have 7800 to live off of a month. Would living off anything less than 7800 be living frugal? That's 7800 a month. That's a TON of money. If you think that's needed to survive, you must be high. That 8% calculator is for people bringing in money on the order of $40,000 where anything more than 8% of their GROSS income would kill them. This is NOT the case for people making over 100,000. My background in this is about 20 friends in pharmacy starting out with 150k in loans and 100k in salary. Single and living the good life.

In 2007 I turned down a job @ $75k to go to grad school, but my phd is fully funded. The main things you need to consider, in my mind, are: 1.) What you want to do. In my field it's hard getting a R&D job. If you don't get an advanced degree with it hinder your ability to get the type of job you want? 2.) Pay cap: bachelors will get you so far and you'll hit a ceiling. Graduate degrees get you over that. 3.) Chances are, if you're at a big company you'll always have to answer to someone with a PhD. PhD's get the harder problems, which may be more interesting. My deciding factor: In 30 years, if I happen to come into money that can take care of my giant student loan debt, would I look back at my life and wonder "what would have happened if I went to graduate school?" This was coming from the mindset of working as an intern for 3 years with the same company and in the same state I was born in. I ventured out, and don't regret it. I do, however, still live like a poor kid. But I was poor growing up so it doesn't hurt too bad. Hopefully those 6 figures in 2 years will make up for everything Whatever you do do not do it for money. If you really want to go to Stanford (and in a perfect world it's funded from them) then go for it. Getting a masters part time at night will probably suck hard. If you can get a job now you'll be able to get a better one in two years with that degree.

I applied and have received the same wait list letter today. Last time I was accepted right away so I have no clue. {I applied this year as a safety net for quals}

Yes, I am from that area, and you scare me. Thanks!