Paying the Piper...

It's an interesting fact that when you're young, you really tend to think about the consequences of all of the loans you end up taking out in order to pay for post-secondary education (at least if you're growing up in North America, that is). Once the student loans get up into the 5 digits, what's another ten grand here or there? This is further compounded because the loans sit completely in the back of your mind for years and years, providing much needed cash seemingly without consequence.

Unfortunately school ends, and everyone must eventually 'pay the piper'.

In the folk legend, the Pied Piper of Hamelin takes care of the city's rat problem by playing his magic flute and causing the vermin to jump into the nearby river. When the city refuses to pay him for his deed, he retaliates by using his magic flute to ensorcel the city's children and march them out of town, after which they are never seen again. Thus the origin of the idiom, 'Time to pay the Piper'. Image cred.

All told, I'm roughly $25,000 in debt - not that bad if you consider that I spent 10 years in University. Now that I'm a postdoc, I've begun having to pay it back - as expected, I should add. This is the point where one realizes that say, $1,000 is actually a lot of money. Put into more concrete terms, if I wanted to pay back $1000 in one year, that would be ~$83.34 per month, a not insubstantial amount of dough, when one considers that that's essentially an extra cell phone bill.

I know what you're thinking: This is all obvious. Unfortunately, I don't really think that it is, at least to many people. Paying ~$300/month for 5 years is fairly typical of someone coming out of university in North America. That's a pretty big chunk of change when you're living on a postdoc's salary. Many Europeans, for example, come out of post-secondary education without any tuition-based debt, which is pretty amazing.

As scientists, not only do we experience arrested development by spending a decade (or more in school), but we're further cramped by living in relative squalor for the first few years in the work-force (assuming that most people consider a postdoc being actually in the work-force...)! Oh well, them's the breaks, I guess. Someday I'll have the dough to do all of those wonderful things I've always wanted to do. Bah, who am I kidding?!?