@Anonymous wrote:
I'm starting grad school after several years out. I knew I would have some heavy expenses, esp. after moving back to the US from overseas, but SHEESH!
SO FAR:
immunizations: $700
shipping my crap: $800 from Japan, + about 300 on this end for customs, etc.
Student ID card: $20 (don't I HAVE to have one? Why do I have to pay for this?)
student MS Office version: $90 (no complaints there, but still money)
and my favorite: Parking sticker: guess how much? nope. more.
THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS
What IS that?
I have a vague memory of paying 5 bucks for one as an undergrad. At least grad student passes let you park in faculty/staff spaces, but jeez, are they gonna wash my car every day too?!?
As a graduate student, especially if you also work as a Teaching Assistant or Research Assistant, and later as a postdoc, you will regularly find yourself in situations where it is not entirely clear whether you should be treated as a student or as an employee. There is a very simple rule of thumb that will be correct in 95% of such cases: ask yourself "which possibility is less advantageous for me?" and expect the world to pick that option! You will also quickly learn that many things about the world in and around higher education are basically set up to meet the needs of undergraduates, and therefore may not be ideal for you.
Good luck and best wishes for your studies! Are you going for MS (More of the Same) or PHD (Piled Higher and Deeper) on top of the BS (or BA) you already have? By the time I finished my dissertation the pile certainly felt very high and very deep!
One vital piece of advice if there is a thesis project in your future: never forget your primary goal in graduate school is to get out of there. It's kind of like an old martial arts film: once you really understand what your teachers are saying, you can leave.
And one more piece of advice: if at all possible try to pay at least some of the interest on your student loans while still a student, because "capitalized interest" can really add up. It took my wife and me some years to pay off graduate school debts and then start saving, especially during the postdoc years, so we became homeowners for the first time when I was 42 and she was 39. Many of our friends were homeowners in their TWENTIES when owning anything beyond a clunker car seemed utterly fantastic to us. On campus when I was a grad student and then postdoc we used to say, "that BMW probably belongs to an undergraduate, that Volvo probably belongs to a faculty member, and that beat up old Toyota probably belongs to a grad student or postdoc."
Message Edited by MattH on
08-16-2008 07:07 AM
TU 791 02/11/2013, EQ 800 1/29/2011 , EX Plus FAKO 812, EX Vantage Score 955 3/19/2010 wife's EQ 9/23/2009 803
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