What is your strategy to pay off your student debt?
My strategy will be as follows:
1) Consolidate and re-finance all of my student loans to a private loan company at a lower rate. Usually you can find a company that offers below 4% depending on your credit, income, etc.
2) Pay the minimum amount on my student loans.
3) Put money aside to purchase a practice within my first year, two at most. Usually, higher cash flow from practice ownership allows you to pay down your student loans much faster if that's your goal.
4) Invest widely, knowing that it's better to make 7-8% ROI on investments than it is to pay back loans that carry 4% interest or less.
That's my plan right now.
How much debt have you accrued?
With my latest disbursement I am at $417,000. It sucks. But, I know several graduates from within the last 5 years who have paid their debt off already or are close to paying it off, so it isn't all bad.
That’s a pretty crazy story. I figured it would be a lot harder to fake documents. He definitely got off easy
He just happened to get caught. Imagine how many are out there that haven't been!
Is it a private school or a state school?
How do you like the curriculum? Do you get enough clinical experience in school?
Other than GPA and DAT, what do the admissions committee really look at/for? (i.e. is the school big on community service, etc?)
Midwestern is a private non-profit school. Most new dental schools that have opened since 2000 are private.
I feel that we get more than enough clinical experience at this school, which is one reason I chose to go here.
The admissions committee here is really into holistic candidates. Most importantly, they are looking for people who seem like team players, who aren't arrogant, and who are capable of seeing the bigger picture. We have lots of non-traditional students, former military, people who had careers before dental school. Our school has a large LDS population, probably around 1/3 of the class is Mormon, and a sizeable portion of the faculty too. I'm not saying that religion is necessarily considered during the admissions process, but obviously there are large numbers of Mormons applying and getting in here. We have a Master's program here on campus and a certain number of students from that program are pretty much guaranteed admission each year to our dental school, though I don't remember the exact number, I want to say around 10 from a class of 140. Our school really values applicants who want to be general dentists.
