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I just attended a friend's wedding dinner tonight, which made me realize a couple of things that has been bubbling under the lid waiting to be realized long ago, but for some mysterious reason, has not.

First off, I am getting older. I suppose we all feel older whenever a friend gets married, and you are still a bachelor. But the fact is, I am extremely justified in feeling older. And with a couple more years stuck in the university, the worst is yet to come.

Along with the realization about age, comes the realization about money. To put it bluntly, I am broke. Not exactly penniless, but definitely related through some strong bloodline to it. It just adds to the misery knowing that friends around my age have already repaid their study loans, own a car, applied for a flat, and have a couple of kids on the way.

I suppose I was first attracted to the idea of doing a PhD and being a professor by the supposedly high pay the professors get. 6K a month for a starting pay sounds like really a lot, until you sit down and do your maths, and realize that friends of your age who has started working 6 years before you finally get your Phd would have accumulated so much savings that you have a hell of catching up to do before you can even be as financially stable as them. And that's not counting how much their pay would be by the time you finished your PhD which seems to last forever.

That's assuming you would land a job upon graduation.

For now, having a Phd seems practically having a white elephant. Sure you have a nice sounding "Dr" prefix from then on, but that comes with a price. Or rather, the prefix itself IS the price; introduce me anyone with a Dr in front of their name, and the word "nerd" inevitably pops into mind.

Getting a girlfriend is hard; forget about getting a wife. At least in the short term. If you are staring at another 3 years spent in the university dorm, with a meagre stipend just enough for bread everyday, you don't really want to try feeding another mouth with it. Romantic dates and long holidays are romantic only to the extent that you pay only for your own share, which is not really that romantic anymore. That's assuming that you have the money to go on any dates at all.

And even if you do like someone very much, there is practically nothing you can do about it. Unless she is prepared to throw everything down here in singapore and go overseas with you to live in a dump. And if you really like someone, you don't even want to subject her to that. You can only hope and pray, like the ancient chinese scholars who leave their homeland for the imperial examinations, that you come back laden with glory (and cash) and nothing has changed. Statisticians would tell you that such possibility is in the range of something small to the power of something big, and philosophers would tell you that it is an impossibility.

What to do? What would you do in my circumstances?

Suck thumb.