I had already started paying some of my loans when I finished undergraduate school in 1993. I started repaying the rest of them when I finished graduate school in 1996. I finished paying them around 2004. During my undergraduate years I was in an internship program, so over five years of school I had two years of fulltime work. And in grad school I was given a stipend and free tuition. This helped me (a) not borrow as much, and (b) have income to pay down my loans as quickly as I could.

I remember producing paydown charts in the early 90s and thinking it'd take forever to pay my loans off, but I planned the amounts I wanted to pay each month (more than the minimum whenever I could) and it got done. My rising income over the years helped more than I could have predicted when I started.