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i still remember the first paycheck where i didn’t have to spend $250 toward student loans, a decade after graduating. it felt unreal. i want other people to skip straight to that! i also wonder what career risks i would have taken if i hadn’t been afraid of missing payments. https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1328480231993249796
this was in the 2000s, before i worked in tech. i was working in fundraising at MIT, making somewhere between $30-$45k/year. it was... not a lot of money. i remember being bitter when people would give advice like “dress for the job you want” because the money just wasn’t there.
one amazing thing about working at MIT though was the tuition reimbursement program. if you took a class that would help qualify you for any job at MIT, and got a good enough grade, MIT would reimburse it. you still had to lay out the initial cash though...
fortunately the MIT credit union offered six-month education loans, which i could take out just before the semester, and repay after getting the reimbursement. the combination of these two programs, enabled me to earn a software engineering certificate at harvard extension school
it wasn’t exactly free college, but it’s the closest to it i’ve ever come, and the fact that this option existed for me changed the course of my career. i could not have afforded to become a software developer otherwise.
