In for a Penny, in for a Pound: The Grad School Dilemma

I have reached that crucial time of year during which I must decide whether to apply for yet another year of student loans while I finish up my Ph.D. Relatively speaking, of course, I have not taken out that much in student loans, considering I have been doing the grad school game since 2001. But it is time for me to be finished with grad school and to move on to my life's next phase. Now I must weigh the costs and benefits of either taking out a gigantic loan so that I can finish my Ph.D. free from monetary concerns or to work my tail off to afford to live another year in this expensive area while running the risk of not getting enough work done to finish my Ph.D. this year.

Being one who is prone to letting his mind run away with hypothetical outcomes, my mind is currently having a field day examining the possible outcomes of these two scenarios. On the one hand, if I take out another year of loans and reduce my employment work load, then I have a halfway decent chance of actually finishing grad school. But I will have that much more money to pay back if/when I actually manage to get a tenured professorship from the deal. On the other hand, if I work more to pay for living expenses, then I run the risk of never actually finishing my Ph.D. Effectively this amount to my having wasted the past six years that I could have spent pursuing a career that has half a shot of actually financing the rest of my life.

In reality the choice above is probably something of a false dichotomy, and the key is finding the right balance between these two opposing work loads. But this does not take the stress out of such an important life decision. In either case there is a positive and a negative consequence, and I suppose I will just have to decide which pair of positives and negatives seems most palatable.