Hi guys, I recently posted a thread about my financial aid situation, and so many people viewed it and responded to it, which was tremendously helpful. A question I didn’t ask within that discussion was, how on earth am I going to accomplish the goals I have in the future with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt? I’ve always wanted to have a family and a house and be a practicing oncologist or pediatric specialist, but it sounds like I will be walking away with not only a huge amount of loans from medical school, but also almost any undergrad (excluding a select few full/half tuition state schools). With 250k+ loans to pay, I am not only very concerned with how long it will take me to pay off my debt, but also how I’m going to accomplish my goals of raising a family and buying a house… and saving for MY kids college. There is no doubt in my mind that I’m getting a little ahead of myself here, but it’s one of those things my mind always wanders to when I have to think of this overwhelming financial crisis I seem to be in. So I guess my question is, how worried should I actually be?
@elizajanebh I’ve been following your other thread and you’ve been given some great advice. I think the best was to take a gap year and apply earlier next year to schools that offer great merit. I might also suggest studying and retaking the SAT to increase your chance of merit. You want to do your under grad for the least $$ as possible.
For medical school, look into various loan forgiveness programs. I have friend who is a GP and works part time in a women’s prison in MA as part of a loan forgiveness program. You might also think about settling in an area with a lower cost of living than MA. FYI we relocated from MA to TX and the difference in cost of living is significant!
@3scoutsmom I know, taking a gap year doe ssund like a good idea… but I’m just one of those people who can’t be away from learning too long, or else I forget. I don’t want to risk that, and be behind my peers. Is there any other way?
Also, I have considered Texas… I’ve been accepted to Baylor and southwestern, two possibilities for undergrad (if they decide to give me more money). Texas is a great place to live, and it’s a legitimate possibility.
You could also become a PA or NP, which would be a shorter time of study, most likely less in loans, and possibly more flexible if you want to have children some day.
@mommdc I have definitely looked into both of those… and if my reason for wanting to go into medicine was to take care of people and simply be in the medical field, then those would be good options. However, those particular branches of medicine don’t provide the detective or executive nature of medicine I love. I want to be a doctor because I want to diagnose and treat, and I want to have the power and expertise to change lives. it’s why I’m going down this path, instead of an easier one, like nursing.
A physicians assistant or a nurse practitioner do diagnose and treat patients. You may want to research these two fields a little more. If research is important to you consider majoring in biology, chemistry or even biomedical engineering.
Not to be mean, but I really don’t think this is a good quality to have if you want to be a doctor.
Also… lets be clear- YOU cannot take out hundreds of thousands in loans (for undergrad). They’d either have to be taken out by your parents in THEIR name OR they’d have to cosign for you and then they’re on the hook if you can’t pay. YOU by yourself can take out only about $30k for undergrad.
Many/most of the med students I know who have partners are people who either going into the med field or have high paying jobs. I don’t know if they chose them that way because they want to have a house and family and all that or if it’s just coincidence.
I copied this from your other thread…
Apply to UAB and UAH…you’ll get huge money from them. The deadlines have NOT passed for those two schools’ merit.
ALSO…quickly send in an app to UA (Tuscaloosa), and get scores sent. Yes, the merit deadline has passed, but if you’re holding merit awards from UAH and UAB, then I’ll tell you (PM me) who to contact at UA, and see if they’ll poach you away by giving you the same full tuition merit. There is ONE person who is authorized to do this and I’ve helped a few students get this after the deadline. But you need to act fast and apply to all 3 schools (correction: 4 schools…include Miss State.)
Living in Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, or Huntsville is not hard for an OOS student. These are 3 cities with lots of transplants from elsewhere. I’m from Calif and have lived in two of those cities. I have a son living in B’ham. There wouldn’t be a culture shock.
Actually…please also QUICKLY apply to Mississippi State. They will also give you free tuition, and that will also bolster your chances of getting Bama to match their tuition offer. Bama would likely prefer you to go to Bama over Miss State.
Also, apply to UTexas-Dallas. (Not UT-Austin).
If you end up with tuition offers from Miss State, UT Dallas, UAH and UAB, then Bama will probably match those offers. No promises, but I haven’t failed yet in helping a student get this.
Please send me a PM for more info.
FYI…the apps for UA, UAB, and UAH are all SUPER EASY and fast. I don’t know what the apps for UT-Dallas or Miss State are like. I imagine that the MSU app is easy too.
My daughter is a PA. Found a not highly ranked college that gave her a huge scholarship for all five years of the program. She had loans that she used for living expenses and several school sponsored trips. Four years out, her loans are paid off thanks to frugal living (right now she boards with a friend who bought a house - my kid pays rent to help the other pay her mortgage off early so both win). Takes several trips a year still.
PA’s can be very independent in certain specialties. She was in family practice for three years and saw her own patients. It was a small town and she definitely had a wonderful relationship with them in and outside of the clinic. She had the clinic to herself for weeks at at time when the doc went on vacation. Now she relocated to an immediate care clinic. There is never a doc on premises- she is the sole provider on duty.
You need a plan.
Apply to all auto full tuition (and possibly more) schools that mom2collegekids posted up thread.
Decide down the road which one to attend.
Work part-time now and more in the summer and save up money.
Pay for fees, living expenses, books and travel with your college fund ($5k a year), work earnings, your student loan if needed, and maybe your parents can spare a bit of money for you too.
Then go to one of the aforementioned schools and rock it there in the honors college. Get top grades, take advantage of research opportunities, volunteer in a clinic or hospital. Do great on the MCAT.
Apply to med schools if you still want to be a doctor.
Take out loans for med school. After med school live frugally during residency.
After you are done with residency, work in an undeserved area to qualify for loan forgiveness, or still live below your means to pay off loans as much as possible before getting married and having children.
First off a gap year is not a vacation, you shouldn’t be “away from learning” you should put yourself in a position that you can learn and grow, get a job or volunteer where you will get some experience that will help you you with your chosen career path. Please know that learning is not confined to a classroom and certainly doesn’t stop after graduation. My father was a physician and every night he would read medical journals just to stay up with current practices.
As for being “behind my peers” this is so short sighted, I don’t even know where to begin. College is not grade school where all 5 year olds are in Kindergarten and all 6 year olds are in first grade … Once you get to college you’ll find that some freshmen are very young having graduated high school early, some are much older being non-traditional students, some students that are your same age may have taken tons and APs and DE classes and have tons of credits that puts them in advanced class standing. Many students change their majors putting themselves on the “5 -year plan.” Once you start college your “peers” won’t necessarily be the class you graduated with from high school. In the grand scheme of things a year is not a big deal.
You need to think long and hard about the potential financial ramifications of a four year full tuition plus scholarship vs, accruing large debt in your undergrad years.
I strongly encourage you to follow through on @mom2collegekids advice and quickly! But if for some reason that doesn’t work out you should seriously consider a gap year.
Hmm… Actually UT Dallas is much better school than Southwestern (LAC) to get in to medical school. AES scholarship at UTD also help address your financial problem mentioned in the other thread. I think your immediate priority is to lock your low cost undergraduate school ASAP!!
So you run toward and embrace those *“select few full/half tuition state schools.” *I have a lot of empathy for your situation bc my kids face similar circumstances, including a sibling who consumes far more of our financial resources causing signficant disparity amg our expenditures amg our children.
But, I have zero sympathy for kids who feel like they somehow shouldn’t be thankful that they have the opportunity to attend college on merit scholarships. They are a blessing to be thankful for. Not a gift horse to be looked down on. You have been given a great list of schools to apply to, an extremely generous offer of help from mom2collegekids, and should be able to find affordable options even at this late date (and that is the place you have my sympathy…that you didn’t know this in Aug, bc that would have made your situation easier to deal with.) But you have been given great advice. Take it and don’t walk away from UG with huge amts of loans. If you work and your parents contribute $10,000/yr, you should be able to graduate debt free. If you only receive $5000/yr from your parents, you can still graduate from UG with only $20-25000 in debt.
IDK if one can retake SAT/ACT after the time frame for a gap year consideration - I guess school to school can decide what their policy is. But for UA, the Dec testing of senior year is what is considered, gap year or not from my understanding.
I think OP just didn’t realize some ins and out of the merit situation, as many parents also have this issue until they find out via CC or another place, often late in the game.
@SOSConcern pretty sure it’s a school to school thing but USNEWS mentions retaking SATs during a gap year so I guess many school must allow it.
@3scoutsmom if a student is looking to any particular schools and doing a gap year, I would definitely talk and correspond with these schools and document. You never know when rules change, and want to get locked in for sure, or as sure as one can be…
The reality is that most HS kids who think they are going to med school don’t end up going.
A not insignificant percentage realize that organic chemistry and some of the other more intense pre-med reqs are not for them. A not insignificant percentage discover that there is something else about Life Sciences they love more than practicing medicine. A not insignificant percentage find a discipline which combines their love of health care and their need for autonomy which is NOT becoming an MD- biostatistics for example, or computational genetics, or cog sci, or genetic counseling. And some kids just realize that if they get a Master’s in OT or Speech or another traditional allied health field, they can be earning a living and getting on with their lives just as their cohort in med school is starting to worry about residency matches.
OP- you don’t need to figure out your entire life right now. Maybe you’ll meet a professor in college who consults to pharmaceutical companies on better ways to structure oncology clinical trials so that they are more diverse (and therefore more predictive) than the traditional trial which typically skews Caucasian/Male. And you’ll take that path- a degree in applied math with a minor in sociology. Or maybe you’ll meet a professor in college who who is a subject matter expert and pretty much wrote the legislation which gives health care coverage to millions of children with developmental delays and you decide that becoming an economist with a focus on pediatric primary coverage is what you were meant to do. Or you’ll get an internship with an advocacy organization which is trying to make it harder for teenagers to buy cigarettes and realize that you can impact millions of lives by preventing cancer, rather than being an oncologist and treating 100 patients at a time. And you’ll decide to go to law school.
So for now- keep the doors open. Find an undergraduate college which is affordable and meets your needs educationally. Any of the large research U’s that other posters have mentioned will do just that if you can make the merit aid work. And realize that college is NOT HS but with more buildings. You will be introduced to people and ideas and subjects in health care and medicine and science which may become much more enticing to you than practicing as a physician- and get you out quicker and with less debt.
You will do great things- but one step at a time.
I honestly think it may be best for students with lower resources focus on degrees where they can make money after fewer years of study. Consider all the non-MD career paths out there where you can work in a health care setting. There are many.
The average indebtedness of a newly graduated MD is $180K. Fifteen percent of newly graduated MDs have $300,000 or more in education debt. You certainly won’t be the only med grad with tons of debt. Loans & debt are a fact of life for med students. Get used to the idea.
Realize that residents often aren’t paid enough to cover both the interest on their loans AND their COL if they live in a high COL area (like NYC, Boston, SF, Seattle, LA) so their indebtedness can continue to increase after med school graduation.
Also realize that sub-specialities you mention are: a) very competitive to get into (meaning you may not qualify for them) and b) require additional years of relatively low paid fellowship training beyond residency.
All of this means your “dream career” may not be possible for you. This too is a fact of life for most med students.
Becoming a physician is a privilege, and becoming one requires sacrifices. Much in your life will be out of your control as a med student/young doctor–whether that means your dream specialty is out of your reach because your standardized test scores & grades don’t qualify you for it, or it means you end up matching in a location/residency program you didn’t especially want//rank high on your list, or it means working in a geographic area that isn’t your first choice but offers a much better salary so you can pay off your loans faster. It means that you may have to postpone starting a family or buying a house until you’re well established in your career. Or in D1’s case, it means that she is not able to live with her new husband for the next 3 years while she finishes her residency and he pursues his (non-relocatable) profession in another city.
But all of this is in the future. You are years away from even applying to medical school. (And 75% of freshmen pre-meds end up never even applying to med school.)
Right now you need to follow the excellent advice you’ve been given here and in your other threads on how to find an affordable college option.
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A not insignificant percentage realize that organic chemistry and some of the other more intense pre-med reqs are not for them. A not insignificant percentage discover that there is something else about Life Sciences they love more than practicing medicine. A not insignificant percentage find a discipline which combines their love of health care and their need for autonomy which is NOT becoming an MD- biostatistics for example, or computational genetics, or cog sci, or genetic counseling. And some kids just realize that if they get a Master’s in OT or Speech or another traditional allied health field, they can be earning a living and getting on with their lives just as their cohort in med school is starting to worry about residency matches.
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I agree. Many have romanticized the idea of being a physician. It’s not glamorous. It’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears…literally…and much goes unappreciated and unrecognized. The income may be high but it’s not without many sacrifices of time, family, and sleep!
That said, while it’s true that many (maybe 75%) of freshman premeds never apply to med school.
Why is that?
Well, @blossom does an excellent job providing some reasons.
There are a few more reasons that I’ve noticed…
- the premed is attending a school where the premed competition is tough and/or there are too many high/very-high stats premeds. Suddenly the earnest premed finds himself with a GPA that isn’t med school worthy. I’ve frequently told the story about the UT-Dallas freshman premed who transferred to Vandy his soph year. HIs UT-Dallas GPA was a 4.0. After a year at Vandy, his GPA was suddenly not med school worth. Were the classes at UT Dallas easy? No. But at Vandy his classes were filled with Olympians of the academic world. Instead of being in a race consisting of strong, competent runners, he changed to a race filled with medalists.
One doesn’t need to be medalist-quality to be an excellent physician.
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The premed hardly had a chance to begin with. Modest high school stats are modest test scores hard to overcome, particularly if the high school foundation wasn’t great. There is the rare late-bloomer, but it’s really against the odds for an ACT 25 unhooked student to end up in a MD med school. These are typically the students that are premed for about 1 semester…or maybe just half of the first semester.
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The premed who didn’t have to work that hard in high school, but still got great grades and test scores. College is a shock for some of these kids and they end up getting their first C’s (or worse)!!
However, if a dedicated premed is dead-set about becoming a physician and is realistic about that career, AND has the stats AND high school science foundation to do well in college, then finding an affordable school where he/she can shine should be the goal…and likely success can be had.