Anna Perry is saddled with a huge amount of student loans, much of which is compound interest. Today she lives on a boat and is working her way through.
After a year of waiting tables after college, I moved across the country and began graduate school in a top-25 doctoral program in philosophy. Student loans funded everything: tuition, books, rent, living expenses, transportation, eating out, entertainment, everything. My undergraduate professors had always encouraged me to attend graduate school, whether in history or philosophy, and I could see myself fitting in well in academia, teaching, publishing, continually learning, and living my life in jeans and Birkenstocks. My pursuit was in philosophy of logic and mathematics, but apparently I failed to apply any logic or arithmetic to the cost-benefit analysis of a Ph.D in philosophy. It turns out—and no one had bothered to tell me this, nor had I bothered to ask—that there are no jobs for philosophers and very, very few jobs for philosophy professors.
I spent a year in the doctoral program, increasing my student debt by $35,000. Although the program offered me funding for half of the next year’s studies, I opted to leave the program. I waited tables for another year and did what so many liberal arts majors short on options do: I applied to law school. I only knew one lawyer, but he was rich. I had never seen The Paper Chase (a 1973 film about the hell that is law school). I had no idea what either law school or life as a lawyer were like. I only knew that there was allegedly a large pot of gold at the end of the law school rainbow and that whatever I borrowed to get there would be easily paid off with a six-figure starting salary. I knew I was “selling out” but I was also determined to enter a field where I would make money, pay off all my debt, and not have to worry about where my next meal was coming from. As with philosophy, I didn’t dig in and research what life in law school or law firms was really like, and naively trusted the barrage of law school admissions and career placement office fluff that in hindsight was fantasy if not fraudulent. I took the LSAT, submitted my application, and then off to law school I went.
Stay tuned for what happened to me next.
*Name has been changed to protect privacy