Financial aid

I finally stopped avoiding it and sat down to work on my financial aid package. While I was lucky enough to receive a generous scholarship, there is still the plain and simple fact that even a generous scholarship is not going to cover an annual tuition of $39,000 plus living expenses.

As part of the loan/aid package, the school requires you to take an online "council" course, which is basically a crash course on federal student loans with questions after each section. It had some reassuring points- there are a variety of options for repaying your loan that all involve giving the government back the money with 6.8% interest. Less reassuringly, you don't have to repay your loan if you die. It also had some handy calculators for getting a rough idea of how much you would have to pay back monthly for x amount of loans.

It's a pretty heady exercise. It's a lot of money, and it makes me pause to consider the impact on the future. A standard way of calculating the loan payments is over ten years. That's a pretty long time to be paying not an insignificant amount of money.

It's an investment. Graduate school is something that I need to do to become an architect. Beyond pure NAAB certification, I'm taking a risk on Washington University providing me with opportunities, knowledge, and experience that will take me to the next level of architecture, a level that I want to be at to take me where I want to be. A top graduate school also keeps the door open to teaching positions and professorships, something that sits quietly at the back of my mind, biding its time. I'm not convinced that the salary I would make graduating from Wash U compared to graduating from a not as highly ranked school would make the tuition differences equitable. To be honest, however, graduate school is expensive no matter where you go. What I will have to cover at Wash U after my scholarship is about the same cost as an out of state grad student at ASU.

Money. Money.Money makes the world go around, the world go around...