Money, Student Loans

Who Wants All Their Student Loans Paid Off?

A Biglaw associate, a Harvard Law School grad, and a JPMorgan Chase VP need your help.

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Having all your student loans paid off by someone else — it sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? But for one lucky person, perhaps a lawyer, that dream will become a reality. The good folks over at SoFi, a leader in marketplace lending that helps young professionals refinance their educational debt, are running a cool contest:

Thanks to our amazing members, we’ve now refinanced more than $2.5 billion in student loans. We couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate this milestone than to give one of our members the opportunity to have their student loan paid off by SoFi.

Below are the stories of our top 20 finalists who shared how student loan refinancing has improved their lives and what they would do if their loans were paid off. Please vote for your favorite member story.

How did we hear about the contest? From several tipsters, including one who wrote to us as follows:

This Gibson Dunn third-year associate seeks loan forgiveness from an online contest. I think it’s kind of interesting and I am pulling for this guy — he has a legit story. Also a sign of the times, no?

We know what some of you are thinking right now: why does a Gibson Dunn associate in New York, earning a big salary and a nice bonus, need or deserve this kind of windfall?

But as noted by our tipster, Joseph Tillman is no ordinary Biglaw associate:

My entire life has been peppered with obstacles that put me in danger of becoming yet another African American male that failed to live up to his potential. My father was murdered when I was five years old. After graduating high school, our family lost our home. Finally, during my second semester of college, I lost my girlfriend to a severe car accident. These experiences have taught me always to persevere through life’s obstacles — and graduating from NYU Law was proof for myself and my family that I could do just that.

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And he landed a job at a top-flight firm like GDC too. But a Gibson salary doesn’t go quite so far when you’re saddled with big loan payments:

My mother had always supported our family on a custodian’s salary. As a result, I decided to become an attorney that I could help to support her financially. However, after graduating from law school and starting my job, I learned quickly that simply becoming an attorney would not be enough for me to realize this goal as student loan debt would remain a very real obstacle in my path. I spent the entirety of my first year working paying off only accrued interest on my loans. Paying $2,000+ per month into a seemingly endless void had started to cause depression.

Tillman then talks about how working with SoFi let him cut his rate in half, shorten his loan repayment schedule, and lower his monthly payments. If he wins the SoFi contest, here’s what he plans to do:

If I did not have loan payments, I would save for a down payment on property for my mother. She would be able to move out from her mobile home and quit one of her grueling custodial jobs. I would provide opportunities for my younger cousins and members of my church to attend better schools, so that they might escape the cycle of violence and poverty that plagues the community I grew up in. In short, winning this contest would help me affect immediate and significant change in other people’s lives.

You can see why our tipster is rooting for Tillman — and why Tillman, with almost 3,700 votes so far, currently leads the pack of 20 finalists. If you want to vote for him, you can do so here, by entering your email address and clicking “vote now.”

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If you want to support a lawyer or legal professional in the SoFi contest and aren’t persuaded by Tillman’s tale, you have two other choices. First, say hi to Patrick Ho, a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School. Before you dismiss Ho as a “Privileged Pierce” who doesn’t need your vote, hear his story:

Refinancing with SoFi made it possible for me to focus on growing my start-up and making an impact on global healthcare access instead of worrying about my law school loans.

My company’s mission is to develop technologies that lower the barriers to healthcare around the world. I helped start it during my last year of law school when my co-founders and I were introduced to an exciting technology that could preserve vaccines at high temperatures. Vaccines are typically heat-sensitive and must be kept refrigerated, which is an important limitation on delivering them to hard-to-reach places. I was inspired by the chance to prevent some of the millions of deaths that occur each year due to vaccine-preventable diseases. My co-founders and I developed a business plan to make this vision a reality, and when it came time to graduate I decided to take a leap of faith and build this new business instead of taking a lucrative offer at a big law firm.

Graduating from Harvard Law and then walking away from Biglaw comes with financial consequences — just ask my colleague Elie Mystal. Patrick Ho is going down the entrepreneurial path by launching a business that might improve public health — but it won’t improve his financial picture, unless and until his company hits it big. Right now Ho has almost 900 votes in the SoFi contest.

Finally, meet Erin Costello, a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University and NYU (M.S. in Global Affairs). She isn’t a lawyer, but as she states in her SoFi entry, “For the past four years I’ve worked within the legal services industry to try to combat the high cost of my undergraduate and graduate degrees.” Per her LinkedIn profile, Costello has worked as a legal assistant at Skadden, an analyst at Huron Consulting Group, and a VP at JPMorgan Chase. Her Huron and JPMorgan roles have focused on discovery projects.

Why is Costello, who surely earns a good living at JPMorgan, deserving of your vote? If she can get her loans paid off, she will return “to the work that I love and had endeavored to do” — human rights work, including advocacy work in the cancer community (she was recently diagnosed with kidney cancer). Helping Costello shift from fighting discovery requests to fighting cancer sounds like a worthy cause. She currently has the support of more than 600 voters.

Good luck to Joseph Tillman, Patrick Ho, and Erin Costello in the SoFi contest. We encourage our readers to vote for them before the contest closes on June 23. When it comes to student debt relief, lawyers and legal professionals need all the help they can get.

UPDATE (10:00 p.m.): A tipster tells us about another law school grad in the contest:

You should also feature Catherine (Cacky) Calderon in your story on the SoFi contest to repay student loans. She is a 2014 graduate of the Northwestern JD-MBA program (although it’s not entirely clear from her contest entry). She summered at Kirkland & Ellis in San Francisco, but ultimately decided to go to TripAdvisor in a business role.

I’m a classmate who thinks she is deserving of winning the contest (and equal press coverage).

Absolutely. You can read Calderon’s moving entry, focused on her goal of helping cancer patients (she lost her mother to cancer), and vote for Calderon — as of now, she has just under 1,400 votes — over here.

UPDATE (6/23/2015, 9:00 a.m.): As we just learned via Twitter, Ashley Hartmeier-Prigg is also a law school graduate (Willamette). She’s a competitive race-walker who is currently trying to qualify for the 2016 Olympic Trials. She explains why she’s worthy of your vote:

Without the burden of my student loans, I could reduce my work hours and maximize my training time. It would truly be life changing and would play a major part in making a dream come true… and allow me to set a new goal to make it to Tokyo in 2020.

The voting closes today, June 23, at 11:59 p.m. — so please vote now for your favorite lawyer, law school graduate, or legal professional!

UPDATE (7/4/2015, 2:50 p.m.): Congrats to Joseph Tillman, the winner of #2BillionTogether!

(Disclosure: SoFi is an ATL advertiser — but the impetus for this post came from readers who emailed us about the contest, specifically about Joseph Tillman.)

#2BillionTogether: Student Loan Payoff Contest [SoFi]

Earlier: The Cost Of Leaving Biglaw In Dollars

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