My last student loan – for my doctorate – showing a zero balance

There you go, folks. That is what it looks like to no longer owe anything in student loans. Not only does it look pretty good, but it feels pretty good, too. Also, here is another screenshot from another part of the student loan website showing the zero balance. Check it out:

My student loans are fully repaid – all of them

As I mentioned the other day, I plan on writing more about student loans from time to time, but I just do not have much more to write about my own repayment journey because it is now, completely, over.

I repaid $244,826.91 in undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral student loans. The debt was comprised of $193,430.16 in loan principal, $14,313.42 in capitalized interest, $2,146.59 in closing and refinancing fees, and $34,936.74 in interest. My lenders included the United States Department of Education’s (USED) Perkins loan program, their subsidized and unsubsidized Direct Loan programs, the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority’s NJCLASS program, CitiBank, and SoFi. You can read my entire student loan repayment story on JerseySmarts.com.

A screenshot of my last student loan payment, which went out this morning

Then two years later in August 2015, I started on a new academic journey to earn a doctorate. That quest ended in May 2018 when I earned my doctorate from the University of Southern California at a grand total cost of $89,286.86. I also financed my doctoral program through student loan debt. Repayment on those student loans began in December 2018 and now, just about two years later, I am happy to announce that I have fully repaid the doctoral student loans as of this morning. When I have a screenshot available of that student loan balance coming in at $0, then I will share it here for everyone to see.

The final count for the doctoral student loans is as follows:

$87,360.16 in loan principal
$1,878.84 in capitalized interest
$47.86 in closing and refinancing fees
$6,084.93 in interest

Total Amount Repaid: $95,371.79

When you add up the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral student loans, the total amount I repaid is $244,826.91. I never missed a payment, never incurred a late fee, and never asked for a deferment for any reason. I took out this debt knowing that it meant I would have to repay the obligations I was incurring. I never asked for my loans to be forgiven. I never contemplated a world where I would want them to be forgiven. I never believed that other people should be forced to pay for my student loans. The discipline needed to pay off these loans gave me a near perfect credit score.

While I am thankful that my student loan repayment journey is at an end (for good, this time), I am even more thankful of the financial discipline and education that I was able to garner over the last 14 years. Stay tuned to my blog for more student loan entries in the future… they just will not be covering my own student loan repayment because it’s finally over!

I repaid $244,826.91 in undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral student loans. The debt was comprised of $193,430.16 in loan principal, $14,313.42 in capitalized interest, $2,146.59 in closing and refinancing fees, and $34,936.74 in interest. My lenders included the United States Department of Education’s (USED) Perkins loan program, their subsidized and unsubsidized Direct Loan programs, the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority’s NJCLASS program, CitiBank, and SoFi. You can read my entire student loan repayment story on JerseySmarts.com.

This is how the title of The Emerald magazine used to appear.

Here are some inspiring thoughts from Brother William D. Akers of Zeta Chapter, the sixth Grand Sage of Sigma Pi Fraternity. Incidentally, Past Grand Sage (PGS) Akers served as Grand Sage for a 4 year period; why is today’s Sigma Pi Fraternity seemingly so against Grand Sages serving more than one, 2-year term? That might be something to think about, I guess. In any event, PGS Akers delivered the comments below to an assembly of Delta and Kappa Chapter undergraduates in 1914, while he was serving as the fraternity’s Grand Fourth Counselor.

“In college life as well as in the business world there is no room for the passive type of man. A dead man and a lazy one are exactly alike, except the lazy one takes up more room.”
I’m sure that we’ve all heard several iterations of this idea over the years – that if one is not being a productive member of society, then they’re not really living life and might as well be dead. Or that if an employee is not pulling his own weight, then they are actually dead weight and should be fired. I believe PGS Akers’ point is that as fraternity men, we must be active in the affairs of our chapter. For the undergraduates reading this – don’t get your defenses up just yet! Too often, today’s young men see a call for involvement as an unwanted burden on their freedom or a tax on their time. That’s not what “involvement” should be, regardless of what instruction you may have received locally. To avoid being the “passive type of man” that PGS Akers refers to, today’s undergraduate man just needs to avail himself of the activities that his chapter should already be engaged in. For example, if your chapter is mixing with XYZ Sorority on Thursday night, then go to the mixer! And if you have a few free minutes during the day that Thursday, then why not ask the Social Chairman if there is some small piece of the planning for the night’s activities that you can help him complete?

Further, to avoid the passivity that PGS Akers warns us about, today’s undergraduate man should attend his chapter’s weekly meeting, philanthropic, and service events. Again, these should be part of your daily activities as an active member in your chapter in the first place. This isn’t a call to new action, but rather a call to existing action.

Some Delta-Beta Chapter brothers hanging out at a chapter BBQ.

Where PGS Akers’ comment begins to challenge us, I believe, is when it is applied to the larger population and its growing number of phobias and general mania around fraternities and fraternity men. Strong undergraduate leaders are not the ones who simply take what they’re given and regurgitate it for the next “leader” to read and hopefully do the same. Strong undergraduate leaders take the information that they’re given, question it in a thorough and independent manner, and then decide which elements of the material are best able to advance his chapter to its goals and his brothers to their goals. The most important part of that decision-making, though, is when the leader takes the material that he has found to be bogus, biased, or not worthy of propagation and tries to ascertain why it was included in the first place. Was this information included in an effort to disrupt a positive, yet traditional environment? Was it an oversight on the part of the person providing the material? Is it a poorly-veiled attempt to fundamentally change the perspective of the leader and his brothers? And if the answer to that question is “yes,” then why is the leader’s perspective trying to be modified? The answers to these questions (and more) should determine how the leader’s next actions.

“We Greeks, and I mean to speak with modesty, are the highest type of American manhood.”
This comment should hold true today as well, though I fear the forces of anti-masculinity and anti-traditionalism which are ripping through our culture are too often preventing fraternity men from exhibiting the highest type of American manhood, that is, traditional masculinity. The conflicting, often biased voices in today’s conversation on what it means to be a fraternity man often leave fraternity men confused at best or uncaring and aloof at worst. Today’s young fraternity leaders need to cut through the nonsense and demand clear, concise language from their leaders. If they suspect someone from their university or one of their elected leaders in the fraternity is communicating in double-speak, then they need to stop the conversation until the party they are speaking with plays fair.

That is the method by which today’s young fraternity leaders need to position themselves if they want to represent the highest type of American manhood. Be tellers of truth and promoters of real equality. Do not allow someone – anyone – to be held to a lesser standard because of their position, gender, race, socioeconomic class, etc. Fraternity men should only work pleasantly in those systems where all people are treated equally. However, what I think most fraternity men will find is that today’s college environment is stacked against them because of their skin color, gender, and/or choice to embrace a traditional view of fraternalism. Fraternity men must work to change that growing bias because bias in any form is unacceptable – particularly on college campuses.

“[Those who are jealous of fraternity membership] view us through glasses which magnify our sins and fail to even show our good points.”
Boy, it’s like PGS Akers gave this speech in 2014, not 100 years earlier! How true is this statement? Earlier in his speech, PGS Akers describes the people who are consistently anti-fraternity as “individuals who fight us through jealousies.” What is most distressing about PGS Akers’ comment here is that it is so relevant to today’s hostile environment for young men, and young fraternity men in particular. Also disturbing is that if you apply PGS Akers’ statement to any aspect of life outside of fraternity membership, then you’re likely to get a similar outcome. Imagine this being spoken in 2015 and replacing “fraternity membership” with “investment banker” or “tech millionaire.” The point is that when you’re a fraternity man, you are likely receiving a considerable amount of seen and unseen anger from a population that is jealous of your very existence because of what your existence represents in their known-only-to-them minds. It’s hard for us, as leaders, to take the comments of Akers’ jealous populations seriously because they are spoken from a place that we can’t enter nor can we innately understand (nor should we attempt to understand). Most of their comments are spoken from a place of jealously and an attempt to diminish you by neglecting all of the good you provide while highlighting your negatives.

My Delta-Beta Chapter guys at a fashion show they put together for autistic students.

My chapter at Monmouth University has had to deal with this weak-mindedness in at least one Greek Advisor. This individual loved to denigrate my undergraduates’ accomplishments and took every opportunity to do so, which were numerous since the chapter was winning many awards during that time – most notably winning Sigma Pi Fraternity’s Most Outstanding Chapter Award (#1 in the nation in their tier). He loved to put my guys down because his graduate school indoctrinated him to promote an extreme position held by too many student affairs employees. And that position is that they should receive external undergraduate successes by challenging the students do to more and reach higher. Do more? Reach higher than #1 in the nation? Really? For those student affairs employees who may be reading this commentary, please take this former Greek Advisor’s pigheadedness as a lesson. Sometimes the student affairs employees need to check their biases and jealousies at the door and simply say, “Wow – you guys did a great job! We’re proud of you! Congratulations!”

“To know that you have warm personal friends, who are intensely interested in you and in your success is one of the greatest of motive forces, and makes us do our best.”
Preach on, PGS Akers! Isn’t this the very core of motivating forces that propels fraternities forward in the right direction? Namely, that no matter where you are or what you’re doing, you have a group of individuals behind you “who are intensely interested in you.” Further, they are intensely interested in your success! What greater squad is there to roll with than people who actually care about you, right?!

For my part as an alumni advisor, I’ve increasingly become intensely interested in the professional successes of my young alumni. When I hear about one of my young alumni upgrading to a new company, receiving a promotion, or getting a raise, I find a growing level of pride in their accomplishments. In a similar manner, when one of my young alumni decides that they want to go back to school to earn a master’s degree, I become proud of their decision to expand their academic pursuits. And it’s that pursuit of excellence – the pursuit of being something bigger and greater than you are today – that I find so great and admirable!

A group of my undergraduates at this past May’s graduation.

A word to the undergraduate Sigma Pi leaders reading this commentary: you will not receive this type of lasting, post-graduation support from your Greek Advisor or from any of the negative voices that you hear while you’re running your chapter. As PGS Akers instructs us, the negative voices only want to magnify your sins and fail to recognize your good contributions to society. Lucky for us, we’re members of a true brotherhood of men. We celebrate each other’s successes and share the aggravation of each other’s setbacks. Those on the outside don’t understand that connection, but they do understand how to criticize their personal interpretation of that connection. Let them spew their hate because it further degrades any perceived authority that they assumed to have in the first place.

“…the strength of our fraternity and the future of the fraternity are in your hands.”
These words are as true today as they were when PGS Akers spoke them in 1914. Remember, when he delivered this speech PGS Akers was speaking to a group of assembled undergraduates from Delta and Kappa chapters. And even though we have over 100 more chapters today and we are a much more complex organization working in a much more biased environment, the truth is now and remains that the future of the fraternity is in the hands of our undergraduates. In a very real sense, as a group the undergraduate votes at our biennial Convocation far outnumber the combined votes of our alumni clubs, past grand officers, and other individuals who are allowed to vote during the business meetings. In a much more theoretical sense, the future of Sigma Pi Fraternity rests in the hands of those undergraduates who are willing to stand up to the hypocrisies that they face on a daily basis. Those undergraduates who are willing to question, in a gentlemanly manner, those with perceived authority regarding their hypocrisies are the ones who will lead this fraternity into the future.

“…the duties of our latest initiate are of more importance to the Fraternity than those of the Grand Sage. While the former may have no official duties to attend to, he is actively engaged, either in building up or tearing down our reputation, a matter of more vital importance than any official business could be.”
This comment follows the one immediately listed above as a further indication that the future of the fraternity is set by the undergraduates, not our alumni. Sure, our alumni may be in elected or hired staff positions, but the work of the fraternity has always existed at the active chapter level. This doesn’t take away from the many great and varied efforts of our alumni clubs and alumni volunteers. Our alumni volunteers, especially, are the workhorses of Sigma Pi Fraternity. Theirs is a labor of love and, if done correctly, their work bears more and better fruit than any other effort put forth by any other constituency in the fraternity.

Some of my Spring 2015 initiates from the Delta-Beta Chapter.

Yet still, the people who are most important to the fraternity’s future are not those with the shiny medals around their necks or the ones who get up each morning to go to work for Sigma Pi. The most important people in the fraternity are the ones who were just initiated into the brotherhood and have their entire lives ahead of them as men of Sigma Pi. Will they be actively engaged in building their chapter and, through that effort, making the national fraternity stronger? Or will they be one of the better-off-dead lazy men that PGS Akers notes in one of the earlier quotes cited above?

“Sigma Pi wants MEN, – men of brain and brawn, clean men, men who love and honor their Mother and Father, these are the men who will love and honor our Fraternity.”
During recruitment season, I wish that our leaders promoted this quote more to our undergraduates than anything else. In the last 10 or so years, many student affairs employees have co-opted Phired Up’s “values-based” recruitment model and demeaned it into becoming yet another battering ram to use against traditional fraternities and sororities. By “traditional fraternities and sororities,” I am talking about those chapters who look to find certain characteristics in the people that they recruit. That is, to find groups of kindred minds who are diverse by their origins and life experiences, but share common characteristics that are valued by the members of the chapter. Sigma Pi chapters should take PGS Akers’ suggestion and look for young men to join our fraternity who are MEN! Find guys who live clean lives, take care of themselves, and honor tradition both in their families and within the fraternity. These days, society is too quick to rewrite history in an effort to make tradition always appear biased, angry, or discriminatory. And while that may be true in some cases, the history of thousands of fraternity and sorority chapters across the country is not a history of discrimination. Even for those chapters who were founded by organizations that had exclusionary policies at their national levels – those policies no longer exist and likely haven’t existed for decades.

Today’s undergraduates do not need to be brow-beaten into thinking that they are exclusionary and that they need to take a more inclusive approach to recruitment. That’s nothing more than extremist jargon that seeks to dismantle traditional forms of masculinity (and femininity, for that matter). As PGS Akers states – Sigma Pi needs to recruit MEN.

Here are some other interesting points that I found in the January 1915 issue of The Emerald:

I encourage everyone who has an interest in Sigma Pi Fraternity’s history to check out the online archive of old Emerald magazines. If you like this stuff, then they are a treasure trove of information!

It was a very rewarding job, but a very time consuming one. I really liked giving presentations at the workshops and making the visits to my chapters, but with increased responsibility at my job and the local college assigning me more courses to teach as an Adjunct Professor, I was no longer able to give this volunteer position the attention that I feel it deserves.

There is a great new Province Archon in New Jersey and he’s going to do an amazing job. I’m still involved with my fraternity as a Trustee on our national Educational Foundation. The goal, as always, is to rise to the top of the Foundation and serve as its Chairman at some point in the near future. It is in this position that I believe I can affect the greatest change on the fraternity as I work to increase donations and build our national endowment to a level where we can begin to reverse the recent trend in national fraternities of raising their membership fees. I want my fraternity to stay affordable for all of the current undergraduates and all of the potential new members who have yet to enter college. It’s going to be fun!

Which brings me to a website that I came across the other day called MoveMe.com. MoveMe.com helps people who are looking to rent or buy homes, move to a new home, or look for finance to take care of their homes. It is what you’d call a removal company – in other words, this is a company that will come to your place, prepare removal quotes to move you from one location to another, and then do the actual move for you. Talk about a service that I could have used over the summer! MoveMe.com provides a man and van power for your move – in other words, they’ll get you the manpower and the right vehicle to make your move a success!

Now, I should note that this service is for my readers based out of the United Kingdom so be aware of that as you consider whether or not you want to use this service. If you head over to the MoveMe.com site you’ll notice that there is a very intuitive interface. You enter your current postal code and which postal code that you’ll be moving to and then their internal engine does the rest for you. And bear in mind – this is a free removal quote for your consideration. I strongly suggest that, when you plan your move, if you’re over in the United Kingdom you consider using a service like MoveMe.com…and I say this as the voice of experience!

Now that I’ve found this site, I hope to find similar services in the United States. Lord knows that the next time I move, I’ll need a service like MoveMe.com to help me get the job done quickly, efficiently, and professionally!

But graduate training shifted the focus. Instead of studying with an eye toward undergraduates in class, you came to recognize another audience: professors at conferences, on hiring committees, and in editorial offices. They, not freshmen, would decide your future, offer you a job, publish your work, and grant you tenure. Turning a wayward 19-year-old into a determined thinker might make you feel worthy, but it wouldn’t show up on a resume or establish professional contacts. You needed to network and circulate, apply for grants and submit papers to journals, attend symposia. Every minute in office hours with students, you quickly realized, took away from securing a letter of recommendation from a name scholar or writing the final page of a conference talk.

How true? Not being a full-time professor, I can’t give you any personal experiences, but I can tell you how those full-time professors that I stay in touch with view this issue. It is a rare professor these days which focuses on the development of the undergraduate over the editorial and reputation-based demands of the academy.

As an adjunct professor, I don’t have to deal with any of this stuff. I don’t have to publish articles nor do I have to edit textbooks or anything like that. There is no requirement (or great desire) on my part to attend academic conferences nor is there a pressure from the hierarchy of my department to get out into the academic domain and promote the university and the power of its various research arms. And this is an area that I would question Bauerlein on…from the article:

That’s how the research/teaching domains appear to professors, and we can’t reasonably insist that they renounce it. It’s a perverse setup, yes, pushing professors ever farther away from the students who need them the most, but a paycheck is at stake. Young professors can’t worry about scrambling students when job security calls for something else, even though they see the undergraduate effect. For new students, the crucial first year gets turned over to graduate students rushed to finish their dissertations and adjunct instructors who collect three or four courses per term at micro-pay and have no standing to demand the best from the kids.

I appreciate the sentiment, though I would argue that as an adjunct professor I have the standing to demand the best from my students. I may not have the standing to demand the best from all of those students who are enrolled in my department at the university, but inside of the classroom adjunct professors certainly have that standing. This is a standing that comes from mastering a topic and being able to teach it to those young minds sitting before you.

Bauerlein also talks about how professors aren’t spending as much time working on spelling and grammar. Ask the students in my classes – they are grilled on spelling and grammar in their writing! In fact, earlier this semester I told my government class: “While this is not an English class, I would expect you all to be writing at a college level. Most of your papers wouldn’t cut it at the high school level.” But instead of just being an ass and criticizing, I spent hours at my home office reviewing my students’ papers and offering them written suggestions on how to be better writers. I even e-mailed them a PDF I call “The Cheat Sheet,” which details certain basics that college students MUST understand if they want to be successful writers.

And I’m not afraid to fail a student because they do not know how to write at a college level. At the same time, I feel it is my obligation as the guy in the front of the room to provide the very best resources at my disposal to help my students become better learners (whether those resources are housed in my head or in other departments of the university). What good is going to college if students graduate unprepared to take positions in the business world? For whatever time I stand in front of the classroom, I feel it is my duty to help prepare those young minds sitting in front of me for the world outside of academia.

If you’ve read all of Bauerlein’s article by now, then I suggest that he is correct – change can take place one professor at a time. As simply an adjunct professor with a focus on increasing student learning in all areas including the topic of my course, I hope that I am part of that positive change.

To start, this was my first time in California and the minute that we touched down, there was a 5.4 earthquake! How crazy is that? Luckily, we really didn’t feel the earthquake in the plane, but there were a lot of people huddled around television screens in the airport. It was pretty weird, but definitely a fortuitous event in terms of how my delegation and I fared at the national convention.

As for Long Beach itself, I wasn’t overly crazy about the location. Granted, the temperature was nice and there was nearly no humidity, but there was no “beach” in Long Beach. The closest beaches were 20 minutes away north or south by car. There was a nice tourist area with a Hooters and an Outback and some other places that you can find across the country, but only a few places with local flavor. We did spend one night in something called GameWorks and that was a blast. However, I find that as I get older at these events I want to go to the bar less and less and I enjoy the time I get to hang out with my friends from far away more and more. The last thing that I’ll say about the location is that the convention two years ago was about a 3 minute walk from Bourbon Street in New Orleans and I don’t know how anyone can top that scene!

Once again, my undergraduates and alumni volunteers wiped up the awards. I have 7 chapters out of some 130 that are under my direct supervision. Of those 7, THREE were awarded as among the Top 25 chapters in the nation! Better yet, of those 3, TWO were listed as among the Top 12 in the nation. The culmination of the event came when my chapter at The College of New Jersey won an award for being the #1 chapter in the nation. Absolutely amazing.

I was extremely proud of my chapter at Rowan University which won the Most Improved Chapter Award. In 2002 when I attended the convention as an undergraduate, my chapter won runner-up for the Most Improved Chapter. It only took four short years for us to rise to be the number one chapter in the nation and I expect the same thing will happen with our young men down at Rowan University. They have great leaders, great brothers, and a plan for success that is unmatched.

Our alumni volunteers also did a magnificent job of bringing home some awards. Each of our chapters has a direct advisor which we call a Chapter Director and the gentleman who advises our group at The College of New Jersey won the award for being the #1 Chapter Director in the nation! Each chapter is also required to have a Faculty Advisor and the professor who serves for our Monmouth University chapter won the #1 Faculty Advisor in the nation award! And the hits just kept on coming as I was honored and humbled to be awarded the #1 Province Archon in the nation award (we have 33 different regions in Sigma Pi, each with a Province Archon). We didn’t expect to receive so many awards and even though we’ve been building a history of success in New Jersey, this was a beautifully shocking event.

Also, I decided to run for a seat on the Board of Trustees on our Educational Foundation and thanks to the support of my brothers from around the nation I won the election. Once again, I am in debt to my fraternity brothers both local and far and I thank them for their support. I pledge NEVER to let them down so long as I serve on this Foundation!

Two more somewhat significant events took place for the New Jersey guys at Convocation. First, our delegate from the William Paterson University chapter proposed (and passed) a major new merit reimbursement program for the fraternity. That’s awesome. In a world where costs are going up and responsibilities are increasing, Sigma Pi Fraternity has decided to provide financial incentives to those chapters which adhere to their commitments to our National Organization. Second, our delegate from Monmouth University proposed (and passed) a new awards program that awards those chapters which perform the most outstanding events for the Sam Spady Foundation, our international philanthropy.

For some pictures of the event, you can check out my galleries on Facebook or on Google’s Picasa Web Albums (both have the same pictures in them). And, as I always say at the end of these events, this was one hell of a good time and I can’t wait to go to the next convention in 2010 in Boston!

The purpose of the annual fall workshop is to focus on the various keys to success for each of the chapters in the province. While we generally have a broad array of presenters speaking on a variety of issues, this fall we took a different approach. We invited Josh Orendi from Phired Up Productions, LLC to come in and run the entire workshop.

I’m pleased to say that Josh and Phired Up hit a home run in New Jersey!

Some of the feedback regarding Josh and his outstanding Phired Up presentation:

He really had an effect on the chapter here at FDU and we’re already putting into effect his recruiting methods. Also his methods turned the little wheels in our heads and we are tweaking some of our previous ways of doing things into a combination of his system and our own to make it work best for the chapter.

This is just one of the bits of feedback that we’ve gotten from our undergraduates. From an alumni advisor’s perspective, the Phired Up team is easy to work with and presented no problems in setting up this workshop. And while I’m going over the workshop, the team from Rowan University’s conference services was great to work with, too. I highly recommend working with both Rowan University and Phired Up!

However, one location where you absolutely cannot lay any blame is on the administration at the university. And, in case you haven’t seen this in the news, both the university Greek Advisor and the Dean of Students were charged with hazing in this case. Now folks, unless these two individuals either were present for this drink-fest or had prior knowledge of the booze night taking place, they are absolutely not liable at all by any stretch of the imagination.

This is akin to your boss getting a reckless driving ticket because you were swerving in and out of lanes the night before. It’s like comparing apples to t-shirts. It’s crazy.

As a fraternity man, I know that many undergraduates hide their less glamorous, local traditions. Incidentally, this is also why I’m glad to be a brother of Sigma Pi Fraternity – we’re systematically eliminating our bad traditions regionally and throughout the nation and replacing them with good ones. It’s a great thing to be a part of, really. That said, there is absolutely no way that these young men would have put this disgusting tradition out there for the school to see AND there is no way that, once knowing about this, the university would have let the students carry on like nothing bad was happening.

It just doesn’t work like that. That would be like Lee Harvey Oswald telling the FBI, “Hey, I’m going to pop Kennedy in the head,” and the FBI letting it happen. The system just doesn’t work that way.

Should the students who facilitated the young man’s death be charged? Of course. Should the administrators? Good Lord no! The people who are to blame here are the young man himself and the students who facilitated the act. That’s it. I fully believe that the administration’s charges will be dropped. And, if the university had any cajones, they’d go after the Mercer County prosecutor just like those young men down at Duke went after Mike Nifong.

Talk about prosecutorial aggrandizement…

Good job – stay classy.