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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

You can get much lower debt levels if you don't stay in the expensive dorms (with expensive meal plans) after your freshman year,

As someone who lived off-campus the entire time and regretted it, I do think that spending at least freshman year in dorms is a really good idea to make friends and get to know the school's culture and environment.

if you plan ahead and graduate in 4 years, and if you apply for many local/state scholarships (in my experience the national scholarships are a waste of time).

My advice to my younger self would also be to take more student loans so I wouldn't have to work. I had to work to pay tuition, but working made keeping up with school impossible. Catch 22.

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> My advice to my younger self would also be to take more student loans so I wouldn't have to work. I had to work to pay tuition, but working made keeping up with school impossible. Catch 22.

This is counter to my experience. I was able to work part-time jobs just fine, and having that experience made me a much more competitive candidate upon graduation.

Depends on a lot of factors -- morning vs. night chronotype, how close work is to school, how close school and work are to housing, how many hours work demands, whether your landlord is insane and kicks you all out with 3 days notice right before the semester to rent to a family, etc.

I would still have worked most if not all of my summers, but never more than 5 hours a week during the semesters. My job, which I actually really liked, demanded 20, which also required another 6-10 hours commuting on top of 5-8 hours of commuting to school.

I had also worked in tech for a year before starting school, so I was a bit less worried about having experience to list. And in the end it didn't matter because I started a company and ran that for 5 years instead.

At least for me, the key was to keep it capped at 10 hours a week. With more hours than that I would have struggled to balance coursework, social life, work, and sleep.

You definitely can't pay for everything on 10 hours a week, but it at least pays the bar tab...

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