I got accepted as a 2nd-year transfer student to the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, which is awesome!!!. Currently, I am an international affairs major at Georgia Tech (I don’t like it). However, if I went to Georgetown, I would graduate with around $55,000 in student loans. I plan to go into either consulting or cybersecurity/defense policy after graduation, and don’t plan to go to grad school until at least 6 or 7 years after getting my bachelor’s.
In terms of student loan debt, is paying off such a loan in 6 or 7 years? What calculators are good to use to predict the take-home pay I would get afterwards? I’ve searched online but I can’t find any good ones.
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In terms of student loan debt, is paying off such a loan in 6 or 7 years? What calculators are good to use to predict the take-home pay I would get afterwards? I’ve searched online but I can’t find any good ones.
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That’s a lot of debt, especially for 3 years of college. Are your parents going to cosign those loans each year? What happens if they qualify the first year, but can’t or change their minds during a later year (because of the damage to their credit scores)?
How can a calculator calculate your take home pay when who knows how much your salary will be? And are you really asking: how much will the payments be if I pay off those loans in 6 years (before grad school)?
I imagine that you’re trying to figure out how much you’ll have to live on while paying off that debt. Hard to tell because we don’t know your future salary.
As a single person, you’ll ge hit hard with taxes, so a chunk of your income will already be spoken for with fed and state taxes, FICA, health insurance, and a some other deductions. Then you’ll have car and living expenses.
By the time you graduate, you’ll be about 22. You’re planning to go back to school when you’re about 29. More debt then? You’ll have to also be thinking about where you may be in life then. Married? Kids? Life has a way of getting in the way with some plans.
@mom2collegekids The average starting salary for undergraduates at Georgetown is around $55,000. So I’m going based off of that, but if I get lucky enough to get a consulting job my starting salary would be $70,000.
Instead of making new threads regarding the SAME issue, please ANSWER the questions that are asked so that people can give you intelligent answers.
What are your parents saying? Are they able to co-sign the loans for those 3 years? Is it possible that they will refuse at some point? or not be approved??
What loans were put in your FA pkg?
why do you have to do TWO majors at GT? Which ones are you doing?
A year ago your parents wouldn’t let you go to Vanderbilt because of money, and insisted you go to Ga Tech. And there was a sister you mentioned a year ago who was two years away from college. Now that sister is presumably just one year away from going to college. So how is Georgetown (even more $ than Vanderbilt was going to be for you) going to possibly work for you? Are they now going to cosign loans for you, with your sister one year away from college?
@cttc@mom2collegekids my parents are able to cosifn those loans. the 55,000 total includes 5,000 in federal subsidized loans. the rest of the cost is coveres by grant aid, work study, and my parents college fund that they’ve saved up. I would only be spending 3 years, not 4, at Georgetown, so it’s more affordable. I am doing two majors at GT–business and international affairs with a minor–because the major that I want at Georgetown, science, technology and international affairs with concentrations in cybersecurity and business, is not offered.
My parents are saying its up to me because I’ll ultimately be bearing that 55,000 responsibility, not them.
The deal is…your parents are legally responsible for that loan if you wouldn’t be able to pay it…if you couldn’t afford the payments or if you were to become ill, disabled, or even die, your parents would have to pay the money back.
Why are you doing a minor with international affairs? What is the minor? If you didn’t do the minor, would it be make doing the double major more acceptable to you?
What is it about the Int’l Affairs major at GT that you don’t like?
At GT, are you doing Int’l Affairs? Or Int’l Affairs and Modern Languages?
You are cutting the salami really thin with all these majors and minors and concentrations in cybersecurity.
I leave to others the analysis of your financial aid predicament. But I suggest that you focus on getting a solid college education in the areas you are interested in, and not worry about whether you can call it a minor. Once you start loading up on so much stuff, you are going to miss the forest for the trees.
You need a few solid courses in world history to be credible in anything having to do with international affairs. You need a foreign language- and a strategic one (Korean, Mandarin, Arabic) is more useful than French. You need to learn to write well- any humanities courses which are research and writing intensive will do fine, and you need at least one course on statistical analysis for the social sciences (how to interpret survey data, how to look at a report about GDP from the World Bank and understand what it’s saying, etc.) You can either take a rigorous econ sequence (micro then macro) or one semester of econ and a semester in political science.
If you are keenly interested in cybersecurity, you need to add a sequence in computer science.
And then you are done. You don’t need a major in cybersecurity- you need to understand the basics of how operating systems and coding and hardware/software work, and you need some programming experience.
Once you’ve got so much stuff on your resume- a major, a minor, a concentration, etc. it all starts to suggest that you are a mile wide and an inch deep. And probably looking at an extra semester which you can’t afford. So keep it simple.
^I’m guessing the parents weren’t okay for a random major for 4 years at Vanderbilt, but are ok with SFS, which is like Harvard for IR.
Cybersecurity - with strong CS skills and internships for government contractors - is a good complement, and should perhaps be your major or be built into a solid concentration.
55K is A LOT of money so you better have strong CS skills and hit the ground running with career services for internships in cybersecurity. Parent PLUS loans would be better than co-signed loans.
@blossom@mom2collegekids@MYOS1634 I am doing just international affairs at GT. However the Georgetown STIA program has all the courses I need to be well prepped and is basically the perfect program (has the cybersecurity concentration already included) while the program at GT is basic and requieees me to combine and mix up a bunch of things. Also, Atlanta doesn’t really have many opportunities for INTA/cyberdedense besides interning at the Georgia congress, which everyone does.
Plus, my social life isn’t great here and I find myself going home pretty much every weekend.
edit: my parents actually are not willing to cosign the loans but they might be willing to do parent PLUS loans.
do you think I could make it work without either of these loans on my own? or do you think I should just give up, suffer through a few more years, and apply to grad school?
I’m usually on the side of money – and $55k is a hefty chunk – but if you really can’t stand Georgia Tech and SFS is your dream program, go for it. Just really work your tail off, pursue internships heartily, and network to set yourself up for a good-paying job once you’ve graduated. Because you will need a good job to be able to work that loan payment into your budget.
If, on the other hand, you can make Georgia Tech work, I suggest staying there.
Strange that they might be willing to take on Parent Plus loans (which are completely your parents’ obligation to repay and not your debt at all) and not cosign loans which are your loans and they are only on the hook if you don’t pay.
I’d suggest you ask your parents, and then make a decision after you have that information. When is the deadline that you have to let G’town know you are enrolling?
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edit: my parents actually are not willing to cosign the loans but they might be willing to do parent PLUS loans.
do you think I could make it work without either of these loans on my own? or do you think I should just give up, suffer through a few more years, and apply to grad school?
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This is odd. Do they understand WHAT parent plus loans are?
You need to get THIS settled. NO…you won’t be able to get these loans on your own…not at all.