Mara Gordon | The debtor's dilemma

It's job-hunting season at Penn.

The people I'm used to seeing at parties and in sweats are now walking around campus in suits and heels. They're carrying those leather resume folders I can't figure out how to pull off, walking off with purpose and direction to the rest of their lives.

It's scary - my friends are starting to look like grown-ups.

Instead, I'm trying to delay the real world as long as possible. Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, any corps. As long as it's fun and challenging, I'll consider it. The office - and a good salary - can wait.

Unfortunately, my attitude is one many Penn students aren't able to have.

Penn officials may preach big things about great financial-aid packages, but the reality is, a lot of us graduate in a lot of debt.

Only 40 percent of Penn students receive some need-based grant aid, or scholarships they don't need to pay back when they graduate, according to Student Financial Services director Bill Schilling. Even within that 40 percent, many people still have to take out loans to fully pay for their Penn education.

Since over half of Penn students receive some kind of financial aid, that means over half of Penn students will probably be in debt after college.

And when loans pile up, earning a good salary - not exploring the world - becomes a recent college grad's first priority.

Take College senior Raha Mozaffari, who's planning on going to dental school next year. She will be in debt when she finishes her undergraduate degree, and she'll be in even more when she's done with graduate school.

She's certainly looking forward to being a dentist, but the idea of taking a year or so off didn't even cross her mind. To get on top of her loans, she'll have to start working as soon as she can.

"Eventually, maybe, after five years of solid working, I'll be able to pay most of it off," she said. "I'm hoping that with the degree, I'll be able to."

It wasn't that Mozaffari desperately wants to do something else, or that the hundreds of other Penn grads who go into well-paying fields do either.

"The typical student in Wharton is not saying, 'Oh dear, woe is me, I have to work in investment banking," said Career Services Director Pat Rose.

Rose makes a good point, but if Penn were able to give students more grant-based financial aid, they'd at least have more options.

College senior Francisco Cadavid, a friend of mine, said his loans worried him until his parents agreed to pay off his debt as a kind of graduation gift. It was a lucky opportunity, he acknowledged, one that few students on financial aid have.

"I'm most excited about not having to do" on-campus recruiting, he said.

He's now thinking about doing a Chinese-language fellowship or a teaching program in Japan instead.

"The fact that I won't have debt when I graduate - it motivates me to look at things that I actually want to do," he told me. "I don't feel the need to have to make lots of money. . As long as I break even, I'm fine."

Rose pointed out that lots of service programs and graduate schools do have loan-deferral policies that allow recent graduates to postpone paying them back.

"If there's a will, there's a way," she said.

But when I talked to someone from the financial-services department at the Peace Corps, the outlook seemed bleak. Loan deferrals require vast amounts of paperwork and financial know-how, and paying them back while living in Tanzania or Kazakhstan? Pretty much impossible.

If you volunteer for the Peace Corps, "you're going to be living like an average local" in one of the many developing countries where volunteers are placed, according to Peace Corps representative David Fossum. "You shouldn't count on being able to use [your stipend] for your student loans."

So what's an idealistic grad who dreams of saving the world to do?

Until Penn beefs up its financial-aid budget, break out the suit and head to Wall Street.

Mara Gordon is a College senior from Washington, D.C. Her e-mail is gordon@dailypennsylvanian.com. Flash Gordon appears on Thursdays.

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