<p>I am a rising high school senior, and I am looking at universities for engineering. I know it is too early to make decisions this far into my future, but I want to keep as many options open to me so I can choose when the time comes around. I am likely majoring in engineering, preferably chemical engineering. I may decide one day to pursue a PhD. My question is - with student debt of 26k in the Federal Stafford Loans, is an engineering PhD feasible? What is the average stipend for a funded engineering PhD program?</p>
<p>Thanks in advance for anyone who knows anything about this. </p>
<p>The answer is yes because you can defer loan payments while you are in graduate school. The funding depends on where you are but it is usually sufficient to live on and save some money if you are frugal. I saved quite a bit back in the day when i was living in San Diego (don’t ask me how many years ago) and my son has been able to save on the order of $20k while in graduate school even as a biologist.</p>
<p>Engineers often work for a couple of years before a Ph.D. so you might not even be that much in debt by the time you start.</p>
<p>You can live in even a large and expensive city on a stipend under $20K, and you can live in some cheap cities for half that. Many STEM students get paid a lot more than that ($25-30K), especially if you have one of the absurdly generous fellowships like the NSF ($32K stipend).</p>
<p>You can stash quite a bit of money away if you live in an inexpensive area and attend a generous program/university. If you live in an expensive area and don’t have a large stipend, you’ll only break even. It’s highly variable. </p>
<p>So I can actually not have to start paying subsidized loan interest until I am out of grad school? (assuming I start right after undergrad)</p>
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<p>I’m going to disagree with this here - I did my PhD in New York, and doing it on a stipend of less than $20K would be very difficult. My stipend was around $32K for 5 of my 6 years; in my last year I had an NIH-funded stipend that was at NIH’s base level for graduate students - just over $22K, which is really absurd IMO - and I needed to take an outside part-time job to supplement that income. And I was sharing a studio with my husband, who paid most of the rent. Even if I was sharing a two- or three-bedroom with friends/roommates, I would definitely have needed that outside job; everyone else on the training grant had an additional source of income (totally allowed).</p>
<p>I would say that at least $20K is necessary to live in a large expensive city, and that will produce some discomfort. I think the threshold for comfortably living in places equivalent to NYC (so LA, SF, DC, Boston, Philadelphia…) would be around $25K, give or take a bit. However, I do agree that with my $32K stipend I was able to save a bit of money every month (although I usually ended up spending it on some emergency or other). You could also pay a little of the interest on your student loans if you really wanted to with that kind of stipend. With $25K, not so much.</p>
<p>I currently live in a small college town and you could not live here on $10K. That’s below the poverty line in the United States. I would say at least $18K to live here bare minimum, and I’d think $20K is really the best minimum to ensure meeting all basic needs. The major difference here is really housing costs, but you make that back a little in the cost of maintaining a car (although I suppose you wouldn’t technically need a car in this town, but it makes life a bit easier). Food is also cheaper - I was dancing for joy in the grocery store yesterday because my favorite cereal, which is normally around $7 in Manhattan, was $2.88 here. $2.88!!</p>
<p>Remember too that you have to pay taxes on your fellowship. So $30K really becomes $24K when it’s all said and done.</p>
<p>I paid back undergraduate student loan debt of about $35k while I was in graduate school, so it’s certainly possible. Part of this was subsidized (so it was not accruing interest while I was in graduate school), and part was unsubsidized but deferred (so it was accruing interest, but I wasn’t required to make payments). </p>
<p>You really don’t need to make an outrageous payment each month to wear down that debt – just set up an auto-pay and put money toward it each month. I started off paying $300 per month, but when we paid off our car, I added what would have been the car payment to the student debt payment. </p>
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It’s true that it’d be tough to make it in NYC, but not all large cities are quite so expensive. My TA salary here at UCLA was about $19.5K my first year, which was adequate for decent living in LA (though with little left over). </p>
<p>As I noted, it really depends where you are. I have a friend in a MA program in Memphis who’s living quite comfortably on their stipend of $9000 (!) a year. </p>
<p>Whoa, that is some serious budgeting! Maybe I just have expensive tastes :D</p>
<p>You should have no trouble taking out these loans. This is a tiny investment. You are easily looking at career earnings of over $3 million dollars if you do well. Stop penny pinching and do what you need to do to excel. </p>