Paying off our Student Loans
I can hardly believe it is over and I have no clue what it actually means to no longer have student loans. For the first few years of our marriage, we were broke college students and then we were broke college graduates paying off our loans. The reality of what it will mean to have that money available for things like retirement savings and family vacations is unfathomable
This has been a tough journey, a long journey, a journey that has required sacrifice and dedication. I have at times doubted whether or not I had what it would take to cross the finish line. Let’s take a look back at the starting line though to get a full picture of the story.
Why I went to college
This is not a simple answer as it is a multifaceted problem with lots of factors that affected my decision. My home life in high school really sucked. Without going into details let me just say I had a need to escape and get away from my situation and college was the easiest path out for a upper-middle-class white girl with stellar grades.
I had worked very hard and earned a full ride scholarship and research position at a college across the country studying astrophysics. This was my ticket away from my current situation. I had doubts about whether or not astronomy was really what I wanted to study. I’m an introvert but I thought I might perhaps get lonely cooped up in a laboratory or observatory crunching numbers all day, but it was my way out. I also wasn’t entirely comfortable with being the only girl in the room in most situations. Yeah, there are tons of movements for women in science these days, but back then I worked entirely with men - mostly socially awkward men.
